The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap.

We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.

I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.

Wowzers this resonated with me. I’m an ideas person, and a pretty bad coder, at least compared to the normal HN crew. I’ve found Claude to be absolutely astonishing at creating amazing, working apps that I use all the time. But I’ve also been aware for a while that having no bottleneck on ideas isn’t 100% a happy situation.

I’ve spent years and years - 30, maybe - coming up with various (often web related) ideas and having to kick them into the “no time, not enough expertise” long grass. Claude removed this barrier - which is incredible - but also I’ve become aware about how damaging this is mentally, too.

My attention - already scattered - was totally, totally fucked for a while there, 5 windows with different agents all pumping out my latest, greatest idea, no guard rails, no buffer…

I’ve spent the last month being very deliberately not this - and it’s making a huge difference. I’m lucky because I noticed it, and I’m lucky because I’ve somehow got the wherewithal to do something about it, but it’s all been quite sobering.

[0] https://variousbits.net/2026/02/22/building-generative-music...

We spend a whole bunch of time when we're running projects pushing back and telling clients to "think less like you and more like your audience". It's not surprising to me that clients come with pre-set notions: of course they do, it's their business, they're in it all day every day, and they're thinking about it all the time. This doesn't make them good at thinking about this stuff from alternative / audience angles!