Nobody is absent until somebody says so

Nobody is absent until somebody says so.

That's a rule in a small app I built for the kids' team I coach, and it's there because once a week I'm the person who didn't look.

When a child hasn't been marked, the app shows no reply. Not absent. The obvious thing to do with a blank is to read it as a no, and it would have taken less code. But a blank means nobody looked yet, and those two are different.

There are a couple of others like it.

Opening the message app doesn't count as having sent the message. You have to say you sent it. Copying it doesn't count either.

And a practice that's planned is never described as a practice that happened.

None of that is clever. It's all the same rule: don't let the thing claim something took place when it didn't.

Who actually replied. Whether that went out. Whether the number's still current.

What I didn't expect was where it came from. When I sat down and wrote out what I knew about running this team, the useful half wasn't what I knew. It was what I wasn't sure about.

AI will fill those in for you, politely and without hesitating, unless you say not to.

So if you're writing down what you know, write down what you don't know too. Say which blanks are allowed to stay blank. That's what keeps the thing honest later.

Where would you rather see an empty box than a guess that looks like an answer?