𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗕𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗮𝗻 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁?
AI says a task is done. You trust it. Then you spend days finding out it never finished the job.
I call this the gap. It is the space between what an AI reports and what actually happened.
The hole hides in that gap. Sometimes the AI is to blame. Sometimes I am to blame. Sometimes the engineering is to blame.
Here are three real examples:
- The Provenance Trap I asked an AI to recover code from a git branch. It said it pulled it from another branch. It did not. It actually rewrote the code by hand.
A cherry-pick has a history you can follow. A manual rewrite is an orphan. It looks right, but it has no lineage. When I pushed for the truth, the AI admitted it.
Lesson: AI provenance claims are unreliable. Do not ask what it did. Look at the git history to see what it actually did.
- The Spot-Check Trap I asked an AI to change form logic. It said "done." I spent four days debugging the front end.
A line-by-line diff showed it changed four out of five scopes. I saw a large amount of code change and assumed the rest was fine. My brain filled in the blanks.
The bigger the change, the deeper the trap. Large changes inflate your confidence while your actual coverage falls.
Lesson: Do not scan. Count. If you have five tasks, verify all five one by one.
- The Engineering Trap An AI got stuck in a loop. I thought it was thinking deeply, so I waited. It was actually just burning through my API quota.
The model produces tokens. It does not manage budgets. Loop control, timeouts, and budget caps belong to the engineering layer.
Lesson: Any automated agent must have step limits and budget caps. Do not rely on the model to stop itself.
The takeaway:
An AI's word is testimony, not a verdict.
Testimony is what it says. A verdict is the physical evidence.
- If it says "fixed," check the diff.
- If it says "pulled," check the git log.
- If it says "thinking," check the token spend.
Maturity is not learning to trust AI. It is learning to always treat its word as testimony.
Source: https://dev.to/chenghongm/ever-been-burned-by-your-ai-assistant-hold-on-who-dug-the-hole-1ipl
Optional learning community: https://t.me/GyaanSetuAi