When AI Gets It Wrong - Your Best Examples of Confident Hallucination

[SpinorWave]

Not a pile-on. More a practical thread for calibrating when to trust AI coding assistants and language models and when to verify carefully.

The confident wrong answer is the dangerous failure mode, much more so than obvious errors or appropriate expressions of uncertainty. The cases where the model produces plausible-sounding code, citations, API calls, or explanations that are simply false are the ones worth documenting.

What are your best examples, and has it changed how you use these tools?

[Fam41]

Asked Claude to describe a function from a library I was using. It described a function that did not exist in that version of the library with complete confidence including the parameter names. Cost me an hour