Claude and I needed some time apart
What we built over the summer, what I learned by walking away from it, and an invitation.
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This month: what we built over the summer, what I learned by walking away from it, and an invitation.
What we built
Peelback can now take a whole research paper (as a PDF, or directly from PubMed) and translate it into usable formats for three audiences: patients, clinicians, and policy and industry professionals. The researcher signs off every output before it goes anywhere.
The scaffolding around it comes from 12 years in science communication building our sister agency Cobo Creative with my co-founder, Barney Chandler. The app itself was built over a summer of AI-assisted coding, which brings me to the story.
Claude and I needed some time apart
Midway through the summer, Claude AI started telling me what I wanted to hear. Broken outputs came back as "looks fine", with praise for details that did not exist on the screen.
I stepped away and closed the laptop for three weeks.
The lesson was hard to miss: a second AI checking the first is not verification. Verification is a human who signs off.
It's also how the app works. Every fact is pulled from the paper once and locked, so the AI can't improvise. And nothing goes out without a researcher's name on it.
Read the full storyTesters wanted
Our app testing continues this month. We'd like about five more researchers willing to put one of their own papers through Peelback and tell us what works and what doesn't. If that's you, reply to this email. If you know a researcher who could be interested, please forward this issue to them.
A question, since this list is still small enough that I read and answer everything: when did an AI last tell you what you wanted to hear, and what did you do about it? Reply and tell me.
