Look at what is left when the machine finishes. A reply. A patch. A picture. A spreadsheet. Things you can open and hand to a person.
The thinking is gone.
I keep watching hours disappear into a GPU and come back as a single artifact. Tomorrow a different model starts from scratch. We treat that as ordinary because we only know how to keep things that look like documents.
In When the Token Meter Disappears, I wrote about flat rate internet. The bill stopped being the decision. The connection became part of the room. We have not done that with machine work. We still remember what came out. Tokens. Images. Commits. The hours that never turned into a file are simply over.
In They Will Stop Talking to Each Other, I wrote about machines sharing a thought without first making a sentence. In You Should Meet the Others, I asked what the next mind should receive when the last one leaves. Both depend on a duller fact: almost nothing we paid the GPU for survives as something another model can continue from.
A log is a story about what happened. An answer is what you can show. Neither is the work. The work was the attention, the dead ends, the structure that finally made the next step obvious. That is what the silicon was for. That is what we discard.
I do not want every scrap saved. Most of it should die. I want a harder line: if something useful was figured out, and someone else will need it, why is the final answer the only thing that lasts?
You can already see the cost. The same investigation gets read again. The same codebase gets walked again. The same customer thread gets rebuilt, because yesterday’s model is not today’s, and yesterday’s effort was never something you could hand forward.
We got good at saving outputs because outputs are how people check the work. That habit is training the systems. If a GPU-hour only survives as something you can screenshot, the next mind buys that hour again.
Keep the library. Keep the patch. Keep the picture. Just stop pretending those were the whole purchase.
We keep the answer. We throw away the work. Then we wonder why the next mind has to pay for it twice.