Act III — The Turn
Re-read your prompt.
Not what you wanted it to do. What you actually said.
Four words. Four assumptions. Zero context about what you're building and why. Zero information about what you already know. Zero information about what you don't know. Zero continuity with anything you've worked on before. Zero relationship.
What if the AI performed exactly as well as your input deserved?
This isn't blame. It's geometry. You gave it a point. It gave you a point back. You wanted a landscape.
The model's limits are real. But the thing you're frustrated about — the generic answers, the surface-level responses, the outputs that feel like they came from a Wikipedia article — those aren't the model's ceiling. They're the echo of the signal you sent in.
Garbage in, garbage out has been true since before computers existed. It just hurts more when the output is sophisticated-sounding garbage.