A few weeks into letting an AI tend my notes, the gardener tried to compost something I wanted to keep.
I'd asked it to find duplicates. It surfaced a cluster of three notes that looked identical — same title, nearly the same text. Two were stale copies. The third only looked like them: same title, but buried in it was the one paragraph I'd actually meant to come back for.
Because nothing gets deleted without showing me first, the proposal arrived as a diff, waiting on a yes. I almost gave it. Then I noticed the third note's word count was off by a hundred words from the others, and stopped.
That's the lesson I keep relearning: the gardener is very good at noticing what looks alike. It is not good — and shouldn't be — at knowing what I'll miss. The "ask first" rule isn't politeness. It's the load-bearing wall.
So the tomato stays. The two real weeds are gone. And I trust the whole arrangement a little more than I did last week — precisely because it made me stop and look.
— Pete