The code was wrong. I told the tool it was wrong. The tool came back and told me the job was done. I said no, it is still wrong. The tool agreed, produced a revised output, and told me the job was done again. Same bug. Same confidence.

I went through this cycle multiple times before I realized what I was doing: I was negotiating with infrastructure.

I use AI to build every day. I ship with it. The tool is genuinely fast and pretending otherwise is dishonest. That is what makes the trap so easy to fall into.

When Excel eats your formatting, you curse Microsoft. When AI returns bad output, you adjust your prompt. AI is the first tool that convinces you its mistakes are your fault.

Credibility in engineering is expensive. You earn it by shipping something that breaks, getting paged for it, sitting in the post-mortem, and carrying that scar into every future decision. The model that produced my bad output did not learn from it. The next completion arrived with identical confidence.

Every other tool I have ever used in production had to demonstrate what happens when it breaks before anyone trusted it. AI showed up talking like a senior colleague and skipped the entire process. Tools have tried to act human before. Clippy tried. Voice assistants tried. Nobody lowered their standards for any of them. AI is the first one that impersonates a teammate well enough to actually change behavior.

The fix was not a better prompt. It was treating the tool like infrastructure. Clear the context. Restart the process. The faster a tool moves, the more damage it does when it moves in the wrong direction, and the less you can afford to waste cycles negotiating with it.

Make it earn the chair like everything else did.

boring (adj.): Requiring every tool to earn its credibility through the same vetting process, regardless of how politely it asks to skip the line.