The client email came back opening with "I hope this finds you well."

You cut it in four seconds, without thinking, the way you did last month and the month before.

You have been calling that "AI being weird this week." Or "I must have phrased it differently." Or nothing at all.

It has a name. It is drift, and it is not random.

Random and patterned fail differently

This matters more than it sounds like it does.

If a thing is random, the rational response is tolerance. You absorb it. You check a bit more. You do not build anything, because you cannot build against noise.

If a thing has a shape, you can put something in its path.

So the whole question is which one you are dealing with, and you have probably been assuming the first one, because nobody handed you a name for the second.

What the shape actually is

Drift is not the model getting worse. Nothing about the model has to change for it to happen.

Drift is the distance between a decision you made once and the state the tool is in right now.

Every one of these widens that distance, and none of them is a mistake you made:

• a new chat, which starts from nothing
• a context window turning over mid-project
• a tool update that resets its own defaults
• a second tool that never had the decision in the first place
• three weeks passing

Notice what they have in common. Not one is about how you wrote the instruction. They are all about where the instruction was standing when the ground moved.

If it was standing in a conversation, it is gone. If it was standing in a document nobody re-read, it is gone in a slower way that feels worse, because the document is right there.

The tell

Here is how you know you are looking at drift rather than at a bad day.

You already know the correct answer, instantly, the moment you see the wrong output.

No thinking required. You read the draft, and the error announces itself, because the standard is completely clear in your head.

That reaction is diagnostic. Confusion would mean you had a knowledge gap. Instant recognition means the knowledge is intact and something else failed.

You are not the missing piece. You are the only piece that is reliably present.

Try this

Two sentences. Write them somewhere you will find them again: a file, a note, the back of an envelope.

Sentence one: the standard. "Every client email opens with the specific thing they said, not a greeting."

Sentence two: what makes a draft fail it. "If the first line could have been sent to anyone, it failed."

That second sentence is the one almost nobody writes, and it is the one doing the work. A standard you cannot fail is a preference. A standard with a failure condition is something a draft can be held against.

Do not build a system this week. Do not organise anything. Two sentences, one standard.

Then notice how it feels to have written down the thing you have been re-explaining since spring.

Excelsior,

Pierre/
Founder, Curio Chat Academy

P.S.: The reason drift is expensive is not the corrections. It is that you stopped trusting the output enough to skip reading it, so now you read everything. That cost does not show up anywhere you can see it.