The archive
I kept hearing Grok would 'tell you what others won't.' Asked it a spicy question and it responded with the same hedged, cautious non-answer I'd get anywhere else — just with a Twitter avatar. The branding really wrote a check the product couldn't cash.
Asked Claude what the capital of Australia is. It said Sydney with total confidence. Mate. It's Canberra. Has been since 1927. I used this in a pub quiz and lost points.
EXPECTATION
Open Cursor, describe the app in plain English, ship to prod by Friday.
REALITY
Spent three days reviewing AI-generated code I don't fully understand, fixing bugs it introduced while fixing other bugs, and explaining to my PM why it's taking longer than if I'd just written it myself.
Cursor is genuinely useful but it is not a replacement for knowing what you're doing. You still need to read every line.
Had a gnarly log parsing problem — inconsistent date formats, mixed timezones, partial entries. Threw the sample at GPT-4, asked for a Python parser, got working code in two prompts. Tested on real data, shipped. That was genuinely impressive.
Used ChatGPT to draft my self-assessment. Gave it my notes, it produced something polished and confident. My manager said it was the best review I'd ever submitted. I have complicated feelings about this.
A for-loop that calls an API endpoint is not an agent. An if-statement that routes between two prompts is not an agent. A RAG pipeline is not an agent. I've sat through three product demos this week where someone called their very normal application an 'AI agent' and I am losing my mind.
Asked Poe where unicorns might live. It confidently answered: 'Actually, there are undiscovered herds in the Congo rainforest.' Science fiction or hallucination? Definitely not where I'd search for unicorns!
Told Poe chatbot a theme and it outlined a short sci-fi story. The premise was interesting (time-travel mystery) and gave me a good starting point. I had to refine characters myself, but it jump-started the plot.
EXPECTATION
Assumed AI would produce ready-to-use creative scripts instantly.
REALITY
The generated scripts were generic and needed heavy editing. It took nearly as much time to fix them as writing from scratch.
We tried using ChatGPT to generate marketing video scripts, expecting creative quick results. Reality: the scripts were off-tone and too generic. We had to rewrite most of it, so it didn't save as much time as we hoped.
Notion AI suggested a poem to entertain the team: 'Rows of cells and formulas dance in form, turning data into norm...'. It literally wrote Excel poetry. Surprised to see an AI get poetic with spreadsheets!