Friday, March 14, 2026

Jess likes filtered water; I ordered some water filters to arrive at our temporary address in Adelaide. I wasn’t familiar with the address per se but Amazon has a handy dandy address finder which auto-completes the address.. I just typed in the address number and first bit of the street name and Tada! all the other blanks are filled in.

Yayyy! Thank you Amazon; thank you address system; you saved me a whole minute!

The next day Jess texted me to say it was wrong.

Ah crud what happened? Is she seeing the right thing?

It was hella wrong. Not just wrong similar street name, but wrong city; wrong state! At least I got the country right!

FFFFFFFFFFfffffff

I fixed it properly the second time by screenshotting the address and confirming with the home owner before ordering.

What had happened???

I was tired and being lazy, when I thought I was being efficient!

I had typed the address and a few letters for the street name.. “That looks about right!” and clicked submit.

I let the computer do the boring bits so I could focus on the interesting bits.

How many times a day do you let a computer finish your thought?

How many times a day do you let a computer fill in gaps for you? Yesterday I spelled “grammatically” with three l’s. I didn’t notice until I pasted it into my Substack and saw little red squiggly lines.

And how many of those times do you actually verify what it came up with?

Just now I typed “saw little” and Gemini suggested “red squiggly lines.” I just clicked [TAB] and it’s done.

As AI apparently gets smarter, it’s easy for us to assume it’s correct.

Pocket calculators are basically deterministic. They’re 99.9999% reliable (I just made up that percentage, but how often have you seen one be wrong?)

AI (Large Language Models) are not deterministic. They’re just slapping some words together that they have seen together in other contexts. They’re often reliable, and almost always appear confident!

Where is the human?

(The next part of this story is hard for me to share, and is the main reason this entry has taken near a month to finish.)

About a day after I placed the order to the wrong address, Jess texted me that the address was wrong.

Several things happened seemingly all at once:

• I remembered Jess was presently on her way to a workshop.
• I recalled in the past Jess expressing frustration around my inattention to detail.
• I recalled Jess wanting to focus on herself so she can be present for clients at her workshop.
• Jess closed the conversation with

I forwarded you the cancelled order and new order with correct address. I’m setting up for my workshop. Chat later x

Even with the kiss mark at the end of her message, I felt panicked and ashamed. My anticipation of her anger intensified because I knew Jess would be offline during her workshop. I just sat with the fear that she was mad at me.

This is where my men’s work training kicked in to get me out of this spiral.

Essentially, these feelings are temporary. I went for a walk outside, barefoot, without my phone.

Walking in nature does something that screens can’t. Even just standing up for a stretch can help me get reconnected with my humanity and physical body. My feet on the ground, literally.

Walking outside quickly brought me some clarity in the present moment. Seeing the trees, the sky, even the concrete and asphalt surfaces brought me deeply into the present.

I noticed a larger pattern: the auto-complete wasn’t actually “AI” in the way we have started labeling the use of LLMs. It was just a lookup table somewhere. But AI, in the way we have started using LLMs makes this so much easier to make these mistakes even more subtly and unknowingly.

With LLMs getting smarter every month, this is only going to get harder. Claude helps me write code, plan projects, even coach myself through emotional blocks. It’s genuinely good at these things overall. I’m not going to stop using it.

But the better it gets, the easier it is to stop paying attention.

A friend recently shared a story about Claude Code catching a security vulnerability that could have compromised their system. That’s amazing. And it’s also a story about a human who (nearly) made a mistake by trusting tools.

The agent caught it that time. But what about the times it doesn’t?

We have to maintain our humanity and choice.

Not because the tools are bad. Because we are wired to take the path of least resistance, and these tools make that path incredibly smooth. So smooth we can glide right past our own judgment without noticing.

Here’s what I’m practicing now:

Pause before I accept. Not every time — that would defeat the purpose. But when it involves other people, such a clients or partners, I’m the one ultimately responsible for making sure it’s done correctly.

Plan more. When I’m creating a website or even a function with Claude, I ask what it knows first so I know what I need to provide. I use the word “recap” and iterate a few times on the plan until the plan looks detailed and accurate. I get much better results than with a one-shot prompt.

Feel my inner state. Noticing how I feel helps me know when I’m getting sloppy. This usually shows up as frustration at the agent getting stuff wrong. Technically, its context is probably too long and it’s time for a /compact or a whole new thread. Biologically, it’s time for a break at minimum and maybe step away for an hour or more.

Stay human. Stay alert. The machines are here to help, and they’re good at it. But you’re the one who has to live with the results.

Let’s connect

Do you lose yourself in the tools? Message me for techniques to find yourself again.

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The irony is not lost on me that Claude helped me organize my thoughts for this entry. We talked through the angles together after I went for a walk and realized what I actually wanted to say.

That’s the balance. Do the thinking. Use the tools. Go outside. Repeat.