# Incorrect assumptions bottleneck ambitious delegation of non-coding work

Published: 2026-04-21T00:00:00.000Z
Canonical: https://wow.pjh.is/journal/incorrect-assumptions

I'm currently experimenting with ambitious delegation: asking Claude to handle big projects and ongoing role responsibilities—not just tasks—with minimal support from me.

Experiments (completed):

* [Do my company bookkeeping](https://wow.pjh.is/journal/claude-code-does-my-bookkeeping)
* Work with my accountant to complete my UK tax return
* Complete a personal finance review

Experiments (ongoing—journal posts to follow):

* Onboard a new client to the TYPE III AUDIO narration service
* Serve as Head of Growth for a low-stakes side project.

With coding tasks, I rarely need to review an agent's work in detail. But for non-coding tasks, careful review is still required. A key reason is that Claude sometimes makes important and incorrect assumptions, and fails to self-correct or flag them for my review. It's not *terrible* at this, but the rate of unacceptable mistakes is too high (e.g. confidently putting the wrong address on my tax return, despite having the correct address in context; making a big mistake about French tax law).

It feels like working with a human colleague who is somewhere between 70th–90th percentile on conscientiousness. But in practice it's worse because the *worst* mistakes the agent could make seem much worse than those such a human colleague might make. Jagged.

Some ways to mitigate this:

1. Prompting: encourage more exhaustive investigation, fact checks and flagging of important uncertainties.
2. Harness: make it easier to investigate key uncertainties, and enable multi-model adversarial review (in a similar spirit to asking Codex for code review on Claude's work) before things are passed up to me.
3. Context: do a better job of providing critical context before work begins.

I expect some of these techniques will remain useful throughout 2026, but a decent amount will just be handled by near-future releases from the AI companies.