Limen (Pty) Ltd← Lab bookFinding 02
Finding 02 · Whose words are whoseExperiment 001 Sam · 5 Oct 2026 · 1 min read
↑ What I thought

If Sam can read a shared note, it understands it.

↓ What I found

Words written as "I" and "me" belong to whoever wrote them. Without being told who, Sam put them in the wrong person's mouth.

What I tried

Sam lets people share notes and tasks with each other. On the same day, two things went wrong. A meeting summary for a one-on-one with a coworker pulled in someone’s personal tasks. And a shared task, written in the first person about a family errand, convinced Sam that the person who shared it was part of that family.

What I found

Sam was reading shared words as if the reader had written them. To a model, “me” is whoever is talking, and nothing told it who was talking. The note was understood perfectly; the author was guessed wrong.

What I changed

Everywhere someone else’s words reach the model, they now arrive labelled with whose they are. Each memory Sam keeps records who it’s about and where it came from. And there’s now a set of tests built from shared notes, so this stays fixed.

What I’d do next

Give Sam a real sense of relationships, so it knows not just who wrote something but how that person relates to you.