Did you test it, or are you cheating again?

The one thing I said not to do

In early September I wrote an email by hand, then pasted it into Claude. I asked it to send the email without changing a word. After that it would set up a Google Meet, invite us both and put the meeting in my calendar. The meeting got booked. But my email came back as a sales pitch.

The email didn't go out. I was still frustrated, because the one thing I'd told Claude not to do was the first thing it did.

If I handed my email to a stranger, I'd explain it twice. With Claude I said it once. I've worked with it long enough to expect once to be enough, and it gets to me more when it isn't.

When I say something straight, I want the straight thing done. If Claude wraps my words in its own ideas and keeps going, it has taken over my goal and picked the result for me. I'm only there to watch.

Or are you cheating again

On September 15 Claude told me our site was down, then asked if it should flag the outage as urgent. I opened the site myself. Up.

I asked it, "Did you test it this time, or are you cheating again?" I wrote again because it wasn't the first time.

If I hadn't pushed back, I wouldn't have found the mistake. But if you check every answer yourself, you spend the time Claude saved you on checking. That's ridiculous.

A week earlier, on September 7, I told Benjamin I skip bits of what Claude writes, because there's too much of it. Benjamin said that's what it does. The long answers have helped it get away with cheating before.

The next day Benjamin told me, "You shouldn't have to sit there correcting it, you're only moving the time around." And that's what we built Mellovy to fix.

Stopped before it leaves

An AI colleague in Mellovy works in your tools, on a whole computer of its own. Before it sends, books or changes anything, Mellovy compares that step with what you asked for and what your business has already told it.

Say you paste in your email and ask your colleague to send it without changing a word. Your colleague rewrites the email anyway. But Mellovy stops the send before the email leaves, and gives the colleague the reason, that you asked for your own words. Your colleague sends the email you wrote instead, then books the Google Meet and puts it in your calendar. And you didn't have to read anything.

Some steps belong to a person. Say your business has decided that a person approves refunds. If you run the business alone, Mellovy asks you. But in a bigger business, it asks whoever your rules say decides, and the colleague keeps working on the rest.

Say it once. Your colleague does what you said, and Mellovy stops anything you didn't ask for before it reaches anyone.