What should an AI coach remember about you?

In October, AI Coach still had my taper plan for a competition I did back in June.

You see, the coach keeps a list of notes about you. After a chat, it writes down whatever seems worth remembering for next time — an injury, your schedule, the equipment in your garage, a goal, etc. — and you can see the whole thing in the app, under "Remembered by coach".

Funny enough, I only looked at mine because something broke.

A list too long to save

In early October the coach stopped saving notes from one athlete's conversation. Their list had grown past a hundred notes (a typical one has 3!), and the coach's reply was running out of room while trying to update it.

The fix for that was rather small. But a list of a hundred notes felt off (how does it even get that long?), so we read that one from top to bottom — and then mine.

What had piled up

The coach could add a note, or replace one. What it could never do is drop one, so pretty much everything it ever wrote down was still there.

Results, for one. On the long list, 38 notes were filed as "goals" and only about 4 of them were actual goals — the rest were PRs and workout times (which the training log already has anyway).

Plans as well, which is how my June taper made it all the way to October.

Injuries are arguably the worst of the bunch, since the coach treats an injury as a hard limit on what it will suggest. If you told it in spring that your shoulder hurt, it was still planning around that shoulder in the fall, and nothing ever asked whether the limit still applied. Telling it didn't help either: in one of our tests, "my shoulder is completely fine now" got saved as... one more injury note.

To make things worse, the coach was only reading the 40 newest notes. On a long list the oldest ones would drop out of sight, and those tend to be the ones that last (e.g. the equipment you own, the days you train, the knee that has bothered you for years). The app still listed them as "remembered", but the coach was no longer seeing them.

We're not the only ones with stale notes, by the way. In June, OpenAI wrote that ChatGPT's saved memories "tend to go stale over time and eventually become incorrect or irrelevant".

The cleanup that didn't work

The obvious fix was to let the coach "clean up" after itself. We built that, tested it on lists we made up, and it worked every time (of course it did).

Then we tried it on the two real lists, without letting it delete anything. On the long one (105 notes) it found 4 to remove. Four! When we showed it the very same list one category at a time, it found 39.

On mine it found more, but some of those were simply wrong. It marked a trip as "over" with 3 days still to go, closed a yearly event because this year's date had passed, and wanted to drop a flare-up together with the only note that said what causes it.

A missed note is just clutter. A wrong removal is worse — now the coach has forgotten something true about you.

Who actually knows?

Looking at those mistakes, each one was the coach guessing at something that someone (or something) else already knew for certain:

• Whether you hit a PR: your training log knows.
• Whether a trip is over: a calendar knows.
• Whether your shoulder still hurts: only you know.

So we stopped asking the coach to guess. It no longer saves results (it reads them from your log instead), it drops a note when you tell it that something is over, and it now reads your whole list rather than the newest 40.

Old plans are the part we haven't solved yet. A note would need an end date that a calendar can check, and that's not built. For now the coach removes nothing just for being old (you can always delete a finished plan yourself).

Which leaves the injury you never mention again (who messages their coach to say that a shoulder has stopped hurting?).

Why can't the coach just ask?

That was more or less my question once we got this far.

Interestingly, sports medicine has been doing the asking for years. A questionnaire that is widely used to track athletes' health is meant to go out every week, and one of its answers is exactly for the athlete who is training but still not quite right: "Full participation, but with a health problem".

PRzilla's version is one question. When an injury on your list is more than a month old, your Home note can open with it:

Quick check: still having trouble with your left shoulder?

Open the coach and there are 3 answers, one tap each:

• All good takes the injury off your list.
• Better swaps it for a note that you are building back up.
• Still an issue keeps it.

The coach asks about one injury a week at most (nobody wants to be nagged), answering doesn't use up one of your daily AI actions, and if you ignore the question it waits a month before asking again.

What you can do

Open the menu on the coach card on Home, tap Settings, and scroll to "Remembered by coach". Delete anything that's no longer true (I had quite a few).

If the coach asks about an injury, answer it. And if it doesn't ask, just tell it — "my shoulder is fine now" is enough.