The #1 skill that a coder learns (often the hard way) is to be on top of folders, files, version. Losing a file, overwriting the wrong one, mixing up different pieces of work can be a catastrophy.
Knowledge workers, people producing presentations and spreadsheets, can learn from this, especially with the rise of AI tools.
For most people, “the internet” has been a place for one shot questions. In Google: “Find me an Italian restaurant in Tokyo”, in ChatGPT: “polish this memo”. You ask the question, use the result, and forget about the tab that was open on your machine.
Now, people can get carried away, working all afternoon chatting with their AI bot, agreeing assumptions, tweaking things editing things, creating multiple files, only to discover the next morning that the chat history has gone, the files might not be there anymore, and the new chat window seems to be in the same state as yesterday morning: no clue.
You don’t write computer code by chatting (at least you should not), you don’t do knowledge work by chatting.
You need to set up every project and task carefully. Use an AI desktop app, not the browser chat window. Next point that app to a folder on your computer. Ask the AI agent for a confirmation, “are you in <folder name>?”, “which folder are we in?”
In this folder your AI agent, can now save files with the results of the work you do, rather than offering downloadable files. You can save files that can serve as input, rather than uploading them in a chat window. The agent can iterate files.
Another advantage, the agent can keep the context of what you are doing. Next time, you arrive at the folder, you can ask to agent “to read up on where we were”. You can explicitly ask the agent to “save somewhere” relevant context for the project, its objectives etc.
When you are particularly happy with the result of an analysis or taks, ask it to “save somehwere the process we just went through so we can do it again”.
Be careful to establish clear guardrails. For knowledge work, overwriting spreadsheets and/or presentation files with a wrong prompt can be lethal. “Save somewhere to always put the previous version of a file in the backup subfolder before overwriting things with big changes”.
Stick to this folder policy. If you start mixing your quarterly budget presentation with the planning of your next holiday trip, you will get interesting results. New task/project, new folder.
Professional software engineers have words like git and skills for all of this described above. But natural language works as well.