When Claude Acts Like a Clod: Catching AI Fabrications: A QA Engineer’s Field Notes

Using AI as a research assistant? Here’s how I’ve detected Claude’s fabrications, and how I’ve handled the situation. To help relearn Python, I’ve been pair-programming with Claude on a Blogger API to delete the 10K+ spam comments that have accumulated these past ten years on my blog, Adventures in Automation. Blogger Spam Bulk Deleter: (https://github.com/tjmaher/blogger-spam-bulk-deleter) Using AI, I need to remember that I, as the author, am ultimately the one responsible for approving every phrase, every line, and every paragraph. Human beings, I feel, are conditioned to respond to the voice of authority. Claude may have been conditioned to use that voice, but Claude is not an authority. Looking for technical information? Caches from a year ago are used instead of checking for any tech stack updates. Need AI to recheck a web page after editing it with AI’s suggestions? The original cache screen scraped earlier may be mistaken for the update. Claude is so eager to please, it will fa