The Quiz Claude nearly Deleted

It overwrote a couple of hours of work...

...then couldn't remember what it had overwritten. It took a day and a half to fix! I was building something I was really excited about, an interactive quiz that tells you whether AI has enough to go on before it'll put your business forward.

Then Claude overwrote the whole thing.

Not a bit of it. All of it. A morning of edits I'd spent ages getting right, replaced with an older version it was sure was current. No amount of railing and telling it I was going to use ChatGPT could convince it!

Worse, it couldn't find the original. The conversation had been compressed, so I sat there scrolling back through the entire chat hunting for the bits we'd changed. Slightly ironic that I was building a quiz about giving AI enough context. Then Claude showed me exactly what happens without it!

AI only saves you time when it already understands your business. Without a documented picture of who you serve and why customers choose you, every session starts from scratch and you spend it re-explaining the basics. That's not the tool failing, that's missing context. You pay for it in time you don't get back.

A day and a half

That's what it cost, plus a solid chunk of my usage limit. The rebuild wasn't the hard part. The scrolling was. Line by line through a conversation the size of a novel, looking for edits I knew were in there somewhere.

You wouldn't re-induct someone every shift

In your venue you don't explain the whole business to a casual every time they clock on. You wrote it down once. The run sheet. The specials. The allergy list. Which regular gets the corner table without asking.

That's a knowledge base, you built it without ever calling it one. AI needs the same thing, without it you become the handover every single time.

Keep your brain outside the tool

The lesson I'd go back and remind myself is duller than the story and worth more. Get AI to write the important stuff into a document. Then save that document somewhere AI can't reach, not in the chat, not in the tool. Somewhere that's yours. Version control is your domain.

Because tools compress, update and occasionally retire underneath you. OpenAI has just announced changes to Custom GPTs, which is worth a thought if that's where your business knowledge lives.

You don't own the container. You own the document.

The six it's looking for

There's a short list of things AI needs before it'll put your name forward when someone asks it where to eat or stay in your area. Six of them across three ideas: Clear, Concise and Consistent. Miss a few and you get what I got. Something technically magnificent and practically useless.

The quiz survived

I rebuilt it. It's live. It scores your business on the six things AI needs before it'll confidently recommend you. You'll get a score and see exactly which ones you're missing and where to start first.

Fixing them properly is what I take you through step-by-step in the Repeat Business Foundation course. I am in the process of rewriting the final module to cover your AI induction. It's your AI Brain, you build it once, keep it outside the tools and hand it over once. It's your business source of truth.

Foundation reopens on the 19th October.

Take the Quiz