Your future might be a hallucination. Mine was. The AI word that snapped me out of it: grounded ⚓

I learned it the hard way building with large language models. Grounded means your words are tied to evidence. In AI, you force the model to speak only from what’s in its tiny short-term memory or real sources. It cuts the nonsense. Not all of it, but a lot.

Then it hit me: people work the same way.

Inside my head, I’ve got a 4K memory of years shipping features and wrestling big codebases. To a recruiter, that all shrinks into one A4 and a 2 minute skim. Their context window for me is tiny. The most grounded candidate wins — the one whose claims are backed by artifacts someone can actually see.

I was ungrounded. No clean site. No crisp portfolio. Just more tokens. So I started grounding my life like I ground a model.

Career - design their window

• One page resume with outcomes, not poetry.
• Three tiny case studies: problem - what I did - result - link.
• A simple site listing 3 to 5 artifacts. Demos beat adjectives.
• A 60 to 90 second video about one gnarly bug I solved.
• One public monthly note: what I shipped.

Health - ground the goal, not the fantasy

• Cardio 3x, strength 3x, track sleep. Numbers over vibes.

Money - ground with reps

• 10 hours a week shipping, not researching. Weekly release. Talk to users.

Social - ground with exposure

• Conversations per week, follow-ups, one skill to practice.

My anti-hallucination rules

• If it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t exist.
• If I can’t show a link, screenshot, or number, it’s just a story.
• Never end the week without a token that proves movement.

The catch: grounding isn’t a magic pill. Rest isn’t sin. People have different time and safety nets. Over-optimizing for the recruiter’s window can hide your real strengths, so keep a private long context where you build depth. Even grounded models still hallucinate. So do we. Use scaffolding that fights the drift — checklists, trackers, mentors, tests, shipping.

North star: long direction. Context window: the next 7 to 30 days. Grounding: the artifacts that prove you moved. Don’t hallucinate your future. Ground it. Keep the window short and the direction long 🧭

What’s one artifact you’ll ship this week that someone else can see?