Building an AI Tool for an AI Skeptic
My partner is a biocatalysis researcher. I am a data engineer who reaches for LLMs daily and mostly likes what I find. She keeps her distance from all of it, on solid professional grounds: experimental science runs on reproducibility, verifiability, and traceability, and raw LLM output guarantees none of the three. To be precise about the skepticism: she had never actually used an agent, a workflow, or a data pipeline. The distance came from the failure mode everyone has heard about, hallucination. For a scientist whose day job is separating verified claims from plausible ones, a tool famous for confident fabrication starts in deep debt. ...