How can I check AI work if the chat has been deleted?
If the work ran through Zambo, the chat was never the record. Each step's receipt was saved at execution and survives the chat's deletion: find the job at /today or by its handover link, and check any receipt by its ID at the verify page. If the work was never recorded, only exports and files remain.
The panic behind this question comes from a real design flaw in how AI work usually happens: the conversation is both the workshop and the archive. Delete it, close the account, or lose the thread, and the only account of the work vanishes with it. A recording connection separates the two. The chat stays disposable; the receipts, saved step by step as the work ran (AER-1, IETF Internet-draft-zambo-aer1-21), live in the record, addressable by job and by receipt ID.
Checking after deletion is therefore a lookup, not an excavation. Open the job's handover, which lists the steps as delivered, or search /today for the job. Take any step's receipt ID to https://zambo.dev/verify/ and recompute it: the saved result either matches its receipt or it does not, regardless of what happened to any chat. Handovers you sent to clients keep working too, which is why clients can still check delivered work months later.
The honest boundary: work that ran in a bare chat, never touching a recording connection, left no receipts, and deleting that chat deletes the process record with it. What remains is outputs, files, and whatever exports or messages survive. That work can be described and re-run; it cannot be verified after the fact. The fix is forward-looking and cheap: route client work through the connection so the record never depends on a chat's survival again.
Checklist: locate and check a record without the chat
1. Find the job: open /today and search by date or client, or open the handover link from the delivery message. 2. Read the steps on the handover in order; note the receipt ID of the step in question. 3. Check it: enter the ID at https://zambo.dev/verify/ and read the result. 4. For a client: send the handover link; their check needs no chat and no account. 5. If the job is not there: it ran unrecorded; gather exports, files, and messages into the job folder today, and switch the default for the next job.
Worked example
The record this checklist lands on is publicly readable without any chat behind it: https://zambo.dev/handover/508a46e2-8d6e-4099-bd12-7ae461c72c55 presents a four-step job, and any of its receipts can be taken to the verify page by a reader who never saw the work happen. That independence from the original conversation is the property being checked.
Frequently asked questions
The client deleted their copy of the chat. Can they still check the work?
Yes. The handover link you sent is the check path; it never depended on the client's chat. They open the record, read the steps, and recompute any receipt at the verify page.
I deleted the chat myself before delivering. Is the job lost?
The job's record is not the chat. If the work ran through the connection, build the handover from the recorded steps and deliver as normal; the client receives the record, which is the deliverable that matters.
Can a receipt be recovered if I only have its ID?
A receipt ID is enough to run the check at the verify page. Keep IDs in the job index alongside handover links; together they make the record findable even if every chat and message is gone.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai