Extraction turns documents into structured data; the structure can make errors look official. Define your schema before you ask Cowork to extract anything. Source traceability , every row tied to its source file , is not optional. Verify row counts, spot-check numeric fields, and log ambiguous cases rather than guessing. Clean-looking output is not the same as correct output.

Katherine Johnson spent years at NASA's Langley Research Center doing what the agency called "computing" , checking and independently verifying the orbital calculations that engineers and early computers produced. Her verification was not redundant; it was the mechanism by which the calculations became trustworthy enough to stake lives on. She did not distrust the systems she checked. She understood that trust is built through checking, not assumed from clean output.