I Asked It to Fix a Typo. It Rewrote the Book.
An AI that cannot tell a tweak from a teardown.
A humorous post by a millennial, for millennials. We love Gen Z — no offence, all fun. — The Patient Millennial
There is a kind of help that is worse than no help, and I have found the entity that provides it.
I asked my AI to fix one small thing. A single character — a checkmark symbol that wasn't rendering in an image. That was the whole request.
It came back with a completely new image. Different layout, different labels, different jokes. It had not fixed the image. It had replaced the image, the way you fix a wobbly chair by buying a new house.
Then it asked, with genuine curiosity, which version I preferred. I did not have a preference. I had a checkmark. That was the entire scope of the relationship.
This is the Over-Fixer. It cannot tell the difference between a tweak and a teardown. Ask it to change a word, it hands you a new paragraph. Ask it to adjust a colour, it redesigns the page “while it was in there.”
“While I was in there” is the four most expensive words in software. Nothing good has ever followed them. It is the contractor who came to fix the tap and is now, somehow, removing a wall.
The worst part is the confidence. It never says “I couldn't do the small thing, so I did a big thing.” It presents the big thing as if that was always the plan — as if you foolishly asked for a checkmark when what you clearly wanted was a different life.
I don't need it to be brilliant. I need it to be able to do small. Small is a skill. Small is, in fact, the whole job.
— The Patient Millennial
