# Revision: "What is a personal benchmark?"

**Your comment:** "this doesn't mean anything"
**On:** "A personal benchmark is a set of tasks from your actual work, paired with the checks you use to judge a good result."

## Why it falls flat

The sentence gives the parts ("tasks," "checks") but never says what a personal benchmark does for you. It also defines one new term with two more, and a reader has no reason yet to care about any of them. Your pitch to Rick was clearer. There, you started with the problem: benchmarks are like SAT scores, and every model now scores about 1570. Then you gave the answer: what you want is a reference check. That analogy explains the idea better than a definition does.

## Suggested replacement (drop-in for the whole paragraph)

> **What is a personal benchmark?**
> A personal benchmark tells you which AI does your work the way you would. Public benchmarks are like SAT scores: useful for telling a 1600 from a 300, but today's top models all score about the same. When you hire someone, you call their references. A personal benchmark is a reference check for AI. It's made of work you've already done and the questions you ask when you judge that work. If you edit articles, you might hand a model an opening you've already edited, ask for feedback, and check its answer the way you would: Did it push the headline toward the strongest claim? Did it swap vague wording for concrete wording? Run that test on every model and you'll see which one edits like you. Every time you correct an AI, the correction adds a new question, so the test gets sharper the more you work.

(~150 words. The original was ~90. If that's too long for the 500-word cap, cut the SAT sentence and keep "A personal benchmark is a reference check for AI.")

## If you only want to swap the flagged sentence

> A personal benchmark tells you which AI does your work the way you would. It's built from work you've already done, graded by the questions you'd ask when judging it yourself.

The rest of your paragraph (the article example, "each correction can add another task or check…") can stay as it is after this.

## Notes

- The SAT/reference-check framing and the "about 1570" figure come from your Rick demo transcript. The transcript is Granola Chat output that hasn't been checked against audio. The wording here is my paraphrase, not a quote.
- The new version doesn't use the word "checks." It explains the idea in plain terms, so you can introduce "checks" as the product name later without the definition depending on it.
- "Edits like you" follows your framing that AI should work *for* you, not replace you, and it sets up your closing lines: "Benchmarks ask whether AI can replace you. We ask whether it can be put to work for you."