One of my engineers used ai yesterday to write a thing without having to "pore over the docs". Engineer and ai decided the third party api was "inconsistent" and "nondeterministic" so they wrote a script to hit it over and over and over hoping to "catch" any "missed" entries. Built a whole cache and mini db to track all the seen IDs as it hammers the api. Luckily I was there to point out how strange it would be for the api to work that way, at which point they read the docs and saw they weren't using the pagination cursor it requires.

Thousands of lines and hours of wasted time and this was the lucky path because a DIFFERENT human happened to be in the loop and asked the right question.

This isn't a general claim about what ai does or doesn't do, but it is a real life anecdote about a very well paid professional.

Someone posted a great quote above that you can outsource your thinking but you can't outsource your understanding.

> Engineer and ai decided the third party api was "inconsistent" and "nondeterministic"

Sounds like it was the AI that decided this and the engineer didn't bother questioning it which I'd classify as using AI incorrectly. AI is a smart intern, not a smart engineer.