I used to believe one thing without examining it: if the report is all green, the thing is correct.
That night I was staring at my terminal. Four batches of AI agents had just built a multiplayer online game piece by piece, and the report they spat out at the end read: four goals verified, four completed, zero failed. I was genuinely a little moved, because all I had typed was a single command, and out of one sentence of an idea it had grown something that ran. I was about to close the terminal and go to sleep when, for no good reason, I clicked open the browser.
The game was dead.
What I opened was a pile that didn't connect. The teacher's admin panel wouldn't even load. The page the students were supposed to see on their own was fused with it, so you couldn't tell which was which. (The finer faults — buttons that did nothing, the question the teacher picked never reaching the server — were things a model called Fable teased out one at a time later, in a sandbox. That's the next post.) The all-green report hadn't lied to me by a single word. It also told me almost nothing.
This post is about how I walked into that "all green, all broken" late night. The next one is about how a model called Fable made me see what I was actually missing — and it was not a smarter AI.
