As a self-employed software engineer, I use AI daily to help with my work. But I use it in a very targeted way and with a heavy skepticism I call “Don’t Trust and Heavily Verify”. This is the opposite of “vibe coding” where the developer is simply typing sentences into the AI and getting it to do everything behind the scenes with little to no verification of the resulting code.

So, while I do appreciate what modern AI is capable of doing, I also realize that it’s a magic trick of sorts; a very impressive magic trick to be sure, but one must understand the limits of AI and realize that it’s not actually thinking. In fact, it doesn’t actually know ahead of time what the next word in its response will be displayed. That is determined on the fly by a huge probability tree.

There are two new videos on this subject that are well worth watching but, for some background, please read about the recent failures of AI at Amazon.

Here’s the first video and here’s the second.