Main idea

The transcript of a user interview, the hypothesis drawn from it, the decision taken next and the brief generated from all that readily end up in the same file, in the order in which they appeared. Nothing is lost: it is all there, in a single stream.

What is lost is the status of each sentence. Three weeks later, you no longer know whether a claim is a user verbatim or an interpretation you made of it, whether a decision still stands or another has replaced it, whether a figure comes from a source or from an estimate dropped in passing. The content is intact and its provenance has vanished.

Keeping the sources, the memory of what you retain from them and the outputs in distinct places is therefore not a tidiness requirement. It is what lets you keep saying, over several months, where what you assert comes from — and it is the only protection against a line of reasoning that feeds on its own output without knowing it.

Layer added by "Running my Contexts directly inside ChatGPT" (2026-09-20). There the separation is written in five registers rather than three — source, knowledge, state, synthesis, deliverable — and the decisive distinction is stated by what each one is allowed to say. A source says what was said or observed; stabilized knowledge says what the system now holds to be established enough to be reused. Writing a sentence in the wrong register produces no visible error: it simply becomes, at the next reading, more solid than it is.

Why it matters

This gives a reason to structure that does not depend on reading comfort. A single stream reads very well; it simply becomes impossible to defend as soon as someone asks what a conclusion rests on.

It also changes what you expect from an assistant writing into that space: produce in the right place, not produce in the right format. An interpretation deposited in the sources folder becomes a source for the next session.

Nuances and limits

The boundary is not always sharp. A synthesis note contains rephrasings that are already interpretations, and the separation requirement does not settle where to put a sentence that does both.

And the separation costs at the moment of writing, while it pays off much later — a bad ratio for a subject that will not last.

Open questions

• What do you do with a deliverable that becomes, over time, the only remaining trace of a source you did not keep?