The habit: ask, inspect, prove
AI can produce a confident answer that is incomplete, outdated, or wrong. Your job is not to distrust everything; it is to match the check to the risk.
The verification loop
Move from a fluent answer to evidence in four visible steps. If a step fails, return to the claim instead of guessing.
- State the claimOne sentence that can be tested
- Find evidencePrefer the primary source
- Run the checkTry to disprove the risky part
- Record the resultKeep the proof and the remaining uncertainty
- State the claiminspect: Find evidence
- Find evidenceverify: Run the check
- Run the checkexplain: Record the result
- State the claim
Rewrite the answer as one sentence you can test.
- Find primary evidence
Use the official documentation, original data, or the behavior of the real system.
- Test the risky part
Try the smallest check that could disprove the claim.
- Record the result
Note what you checked, what happened, and what remains uncertain.
Try it
An AI assistant says: “This configuration makes the page private.” What evidence would prove that an unauthenticated visitor is actually blocked?
The code looks correct and the AI agrees.
Open a signed-out session, request the page directly, and confirm the server rejects or redirects it before returning private data.