Sample frameDay 135·AI Fluency · Verification

Morning. Somewhere in the document you sent last week is a number nobody has ever opened.

AI Fluency.

The Verification Trail

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Take the last thing you sent out with a machine's help in it — the board paper, the client memo, the funding application. Could you walk a hostile reader from every figure back to a page you opened yourself, or would you be going looking now, with your name already on it?

The idea

Ben Bradlee ran the Washington Post newsroom from 1968 to 1991, and the rule he is remembered for was not about writing at all. Through the Watergate reporting that began in 1972 he held Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to independent confirmation: a fact went into the paper when two sources, unconnected to one another, had each supplied it. Remembered is the honest word there, because the Post's own editors have disagreed publicly ever since about whether the two-source rule was ever a stated policy — which is worth knowing on the one morning of this module that is about not repeating what you have not checked. The standard survives the argument. It was never scepticism about his reporters, who were diligent, nor about their sources, who were largely right; it was an acknowledgement that confidence is not evidence, and that the cost of printing a plausible falsehood lands on the institution rather than on whoever happened to believe it. The trap is that everyone in the chain assumes somebody else did the checking: you assume the analyst did, the analyst assumed the model did, and the model assumes nothing at all. What sits on your desk now produces unchecked claims faster than any newsroom ever could, and it never tires and never sounds unsure. The standard doesn't need rewriting. It needs pointing at that.

The framework

01
Four kinds of claim, four different checks.
Before you check anything, mark up the draft. Numbers get re-derived. Attributions — who said it, who wrote it, what their title was — get confirmed against the organisation's own page or the paper's own front matter. Quotes get matched word for word against the original, because a paraphrase inside quotation marks is a fabrication. Causal claims, the ones asserting that X drove Y, need the study behind them or they come out of the document. Four passes, each hunting one thing, beat a single pass asking whether it all looks right.
02
Re-run every calculation somewhere that cannot improvise.
A language model produces arithmetic the way it produces prose, by predicting what the answer looks like. Sometimes it is exactly right, and it sounds identical either way. So no number reaches a reader straight from a chat window. Rebuild the calculation in a spreadsheet, a calculator, or code you've actually read, and confirm the inputs match the source rather than a summary of the source. The dangerous figure is never the absurd one, which somebody catches on the way past. It's the one that is entirely plausible and wrong, and it survives every internal reading it will ever get.
03
Every retelling drops another qualifier.
Grounding an answer in documents you supplied narrows the problem; it doesn't close it, and a model citing the wider world closes nothing. Track each claim back to the thing itself: the filing rather than the article about the filing, the paper rather than the post summarising the paper, the contract rather than the CRM note about the contract. First the sample goes, then the year, then the country, then the word estimated, until by the third hop a hedged projection has become a fact with a decimal place. When you can't reach the primary source, the claim isn't softened. It's cut.
04
Leave a trail a stranger could follow without you.
Verification that lives in your head protects nobody, because the question always arrives months later, in a meeting, to somebody else. Keep a column: the claim, the source, the clause or link, who checked it, the date. The column works because a blank checked-by cell is a visible hole with somebody's name missing from it, and that is much harder to wave through than an assumption nobody ever wrote down. And the trail is not for you. It is for the auditor, the journalist, the opposing counsel or your own successor, fourteen months from now, when you're not in the room and the document still is.

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