Less technical than my usual posts. Nothing to install, nothing to pay for, and it works the same whether you're using an AI assistant for code, spreadsheets, research or writing.
Here is the shape of the problem I want to describe. See if you recognise it.
You ask your assistant to do something that produces a result. It does. A number, a summary, a status, an answer comes back. It's plausible. You ask why, and you get a clear, confident explanation that makes complete sense of it. So you believe it, you write it down, and you build your next three decisions on top of it.
A week later you find out the whole thing was wrong. Not wrong in an obvious way. Wrong because the tool was measuring something you didn't ask about, or reading a file that was empty, or answering a slightly different question than the one in your head.
Notice what didn't happen there. Nothing was invented. No fake citation, no made-up fact, none of the failures people mean when they say "hallucination". The failure was structural: nobody committed to what the answer should be while it was still possible to be wrong.
