Pitfalls
Fluent, well organised and about nothing: the output to throw away
Some results are not improvable by editing because there is nothing underneath the prose, and learning to…
· 4 min read
Pitfalls
The confident wrong answer, and how to catch it before it ships.
20 articles · page 1 of 2
Pitfalls
Catching a wrong answer means checking the claim, not asking again
Verification has to touch something outside the conversation, and every technique that stays inside it is a rough filter that will pass confident errors.
By Naina Sethi · · 3 min read
Pitfalls
A tool that agrees with you has not confirmed anything
Agreement is close to free, which makes it worthless as evidence and dangerous as a habit, particularly…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
What you paste in is a decision you have already made
The information you supply leaves your control at the moment you send it, and most of the thinking about…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
The skill you stop practising is the one you needed to check the output
Reviewing generated work well depends on the same competence that producing it would have built, which…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
A summary you accepted is a document you have not read
Condensing long material is one of the most trusted uses of these tools and one of the least examined…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
The first draft you are shown becomes the piece you write
Reading a generated version before forming your own view narrows what you subsequently produce, and the…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
Right answer, wrong reasoning, and it breaks on the next case
Checking whether a result is correct is not the same as checking whether the method behind it was, and the…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
Some things stay yours because the consequences do
Deciding what never to hand over is a judgement about responsibility and relationships rather than about…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
The tells that survive into published work
A recognisable set of artefacts makes it out of the draft and onto the page, and most of them are removable…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
The output that is nearly right is the one that gets through
Obvious errors are caught by anybody; the damage is done by results that are correct in every visible…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
When checking costs more than doing, the tool has stopped saving anything
Every use has a verification cost attached, and the tasks worth automating are the ones where confirming…
· 3 min read