The Lost Choices Audit
This worksheet is private to you. I don't see or keep your answers, and once you've gathered them for yourself, they're gone.
Four questions to run on every AI integration in your stack.
Every AI tool arrives with default settings, and then makes decisions without you.
The model picks the library. The agent chooses the tool. And maybe most of the time that'll work out fine. The trouble is when nobody writes those choices down, and later nobody can say which ones were important, who made them, or why you abandoned them.
This worksheet is how you figure out what you've set aside, and what's important to protect. Pick one integration — a coding assistant, a model behind a customer-facing feature, an agent with access to your repos — and work through the four questions with the people responsible for it. Write the answers down. The written record is what you're building.
1. Who set the default?
What the tool does when nobody tells it otherwise.
- Which model, vendor and configuration is running right now, and who chose it?
- What resource category does it recommend or generate when a developer doesn't specify — libraries, packages, frameworks, cloud services?
- When did anyone last check whether that default suits this system, or whether there's a better configuration specific to your org?
Red flag: "It came that way."
2. Can you leave?
The cost of changing your mind.
- If this vendor doubled its price or changed its terms tomorrow, how long would it take to switch to something else?
- What data, prompts, fine-tunes or workflows exist only inside their system?
- Has anyone tested the way out, or is it assumed?
Red flag: Nobody can estimate the switching cost.
3. Who speaks first?
When a person and the tool both weigh in, whose opinion carries more weight?
- Does the tool's suggestion appear before a person has formed a view of their own?
- In review, are people checking the output or just approving it?
- Before anything the model suggests gets installed, does someone confirm the package actually exists, and that it's the one you meant?
Red flag: The first draft is always the machine's.
4. Who still knows how?
The skill underneath the tool.
- If the tool went down for a week, who on the team could do this work without it?
- Are newer engineers learning the underlying skill, or only the prompt?
- What knowledge would leave with the one person who still remembers how this was done by hand?
Red flag: You can only name one person, or no one at all.
Score it
Complete the worksheet below to assess whether you're hostage to the defaults, and how to reclaim some agency.
The Lost Choices Audit is from Jacob Ward, author of The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back. He reports on how AI narrows the choices available to people and institutions at The Rip Current.
Score your integration
Pick the answer that describes your team today (not the one you wish were true). When you're done you can copy, email or download your answers. I don't see or keep your answers.
This worksheet puts each answer into one of three kinds:
- Chosen: someone decided on purpose, and it's written down.
- Inherited: it came with the tool, and you kept it.
- Unknown: nobody in the room can say.
Say your coding assistant suggests a package. If your team keeps an approved list and someone checks every new dependency before it goes in, that's Chosen. If whatever the assistant suggests gets installed because it usually works, that's Inherited. If nobody can tell you how packages get picked, that's Unknown.
Your score
Answer all four questions to see your result.