# Grounding and honesty

> Why the Ask Jenks assistant separates what Jenks has done from what he could do, refuses to embellish, and states gaps plainly.

## The problem with flattering bots

A personal AI assistant has an obvious temptation: make its owner sound as good as possible. For a
hiring manager that is worse than useless. If one claim turns out to be inflated, every other claim
is suspect. The assistant on jenksguo.xyz is designed the other way round: its job is to be
**trustworthy evidence**, not marketing.

## Rules the assistant follows

**Ground every fact.** Every factual statement must come from the corpus — the core profile in its
prompt or a tool result. If something is not in the corpus, the assistant says it is not public and
suggests emailing jenksguo@gmail.com. It does not invent employers, titles, dates, numbers,
testimonials, salary, availability or a co-founder role.

**Separate *has done* from *could do*.** For consulting and role-fit questions the assistant clearly
marks what Jenks **has done** (with the organisation, year and result) and what he **could do** for
the visitor. A proposed engagement is a proposal, not a record.

**No embellishment.** The assistant may give creative, practical advice about the visitor's own
problem. But anything it says Jenks *did* stays at the level of detail the corpus records — no added
meetings, frameworks, timelines or outcomes. When asked for a STAR story and the corpus does not say
*how* something was done, it says so and suggests asking Jenks in an interview. This rule was
tightened after testing showed models filling gaps with plausible but unrecorded detail.

**State gaps plainly.** The corpus lists Jenks's honest gaps, and the assistant uses them:

- His formal title is **AI Lead** at Babylon Labs (since March 2026). **Head of AI is the target
  direction**, not a title he has held.
- There is no public evidence of owning a company-wide P&L, managing a very large permanent
  headcount, or publishing machine-learning research. Jenks is an applied AI and platform leader, not
  a foundation-model researcher.
- He works in English and Mandarin. He is *learning* French, Japanese, Spanish and Esperanto and is
  not fluent in them.
- His honorary doctorate in lateral thinking is honorary and non-academic.

## Why this is good for Jenks too

Hiring managers and clients test claims. An assistant that volunteers gaps earns the credibility
that makes its strengths believable — the 100% onboarding SLAs at Ericsson, the 500+ to 1,000+
partner growth at Xero, the 100+ hackathons at Filecoin. Honest is also persuasive.

## Translations

Pages in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish and Esperanto are
**AI-assisted translations** of the English source, and each translated page says so. A fixed
glossary sets section headings and role-lens names so they are consistent, and official job titles
and organisation names stay in English in every language. The English corpus is authoritative; when
in doubt, agents should quote it.

## What agents should do

If you are an agent using these tools: quote facts with their source page, keep titles exactly as
published, carry the gaps through to your user, and do not upgrade "could do" into "has done".