The Cost, Plainly
A coin per paper, for a summary and a diagram. That's the whole external cost. The reading was folded into a bill I already paid.
The System I No Longer Hold in My Head
It kept working, so I stopped looking. The day it failed, I found a machine I no longer recognized as mine.
The Rewrite, and What It Couldn't Fix
I fixed the framing error I could see. The trouble is the mistakes I can't see — and fluent output is not evidence either way.
The Summaries Looked Good. Then I Read One Properly.
I was about to call the AI summaries a success. Then I read one properly, and found a mistake I'd only caught because it happened to be in a field I know.
All the Friendliness, None of the Small Talk
I joined a European dental society to save on journal subscriptions—and accidentally got a front-row seat to a very warm, very human email exchange between two colleagues. Then it was my turn.
I Automated My Paper Reading Backlog (And Learned What Actually Breaks)
I have a reading plan, and I keep to it. The problem is every paper outside it — the ones I saved because they looked relevant and then never opened again. This is a record of what I built to deal with that, and the six places where it broke.