AI can make you think your smarter and more knowledgeable than you really are. The base phenomenon Psychologist Frank Keil found people rate their understanding of how things work (toilets, zippers, engines) much higher than they actually can explain — until you ask them to explain it step by step, and the confidence collapses. Fluent exposure to an explanation gets mistaken for possessing the explanation yourself. What AI adds on top 1. Fluency as a proxy for truth/competence. When output reads clean, structured, and confident, your brain uses “this is easy to follow” as a stand-in for “I understand this.” AI text is optimized for exactly that fluency, so the proxy misfires more than it does with a messy textbook or a mumbling human expert. 2. Co-authorship inflation. You typed the prompts, made choices, steered the direction — so you feel ownership over the output the same way you’d feel ownership over code you wrote. But steering isn’t the same as generating the underlying logic. You built the map; the AI built the terrain. 3. No friction, no failure signal. Normally, hitting the edge of your understanding feels like friction — you get stuck, you have to look something up, you notice the gap. AI smooths that friction away by answering immediately, so the gap never announces itself. You only find it later, when something breaks or someone asks you to defend a step. 4. Automation bias. Once a system has been right a few times, you extend it trust it hasn’t earned on the next output, especially in domains (like algorithmic finance) where verifying correctness is itself hard. 5. The practical tell, If you can use the model and get the right answer but can’t predict when it’ll be wrong or explain a step to someone else without the AI’s help — that’s the gap between “I operated it” and “I understand it.” Not a character flaw, just how fluency-based confidence works. The fix isn’t “understand everything.” It’s knowing which parts of the map you’re taking on faith vs. which parts you could rebuild from scratch. If you find what your working on leads to this, —pick the 2-3 load-bearing assumptions and force yourself to derive them without the AI, even roughly. That’s usually enough to convert vibes-confidence into real confidence, or to find out it doesn’t hold up.

OK I joke but I may be lol My Jon they are 100% in on Ai...well, Co-Pilot and they force u t use it. for EVERYTHING! Most have this high-horse maturity you just need to know how to prompt it properly. Duping things into Copilot chat a copy and pasting the rusts. Big one, prompts and complete garbage data and expecting it to fix everything. No context, no workflows, no this is what good looks like of bad looks like. I have been on some calls recently where I push back on the phrase, "just ask Copilot", I sk what dos that mean? ask it what? People just want to throw that put like it is the be all answer. I keep trying to convey "Prompting" isbn the answer "CONTEXT" is. that a workflow that processes things in a flow where we control what we want from it. W tell it what we want not fed it garbage and have it tell us how to fix the data. Im not sure how people still think AI will jut fix everything and you don't have to instruct it and tell it what you want. So I argive and push back and I can tell the people who keep saying just put it in Copilot get imitated. Managers and higher up people. I don't think they like being questioned when they say just ask AI and they can't really ay what that means. I can! I can explain ICM and this is what our data should flow through so we can orchestrate the data it is producing for us. Rather than having it spit out slop and we spend 10x as much time cleaning up the trashy results rather than cleaning the data 1st and defining the end product clearly rather than vague requirements full of questions nobody can answer. So thanks @Jake Van Clief I may get in trouble because I see where AI is not used anywhere near it s potential and have grown way beyond the method f feeding a AI Chat a long single prompt. Either way I guess I think you for opening my mind to a better way. Now if I could just get it across that we can do so much more if we used it right.