Recon Before You Build

Experiment Log · 2026-06-24 · 05:15 PM PT

Hypothesis: An AI assistant's self-generated 'future opportunities' list is net-new work worth scoping and building.

Constraint: Ground each suggestion against live system state before authoring any build plan; one canonical per capability; no greenfield until anti-dup is proven.

Result: Failed. Two flagship 'opportunities' turned out ~75-80% already shipped. A grounding recon pass reclassified every component already-have / partial / net-new against live state; the honest deliverable shrank to a thin integration adapter for one and a read-only audit plus small hygiene fixes for the other. Building either as proposed would have duplicated shipped, tested infrastructure.

Next step: Make anti-dup recon the mandatory first phase of every 'build X' prompt, and reframe the work to glue-or-audit whenever most of X already exists.

Tags: #execution #systems #failure-modes