Your workflow is exactly the kind of vendor-bait that gets sold as "productivity." You're manually curating a gold-standard corpus in your notes app just to make the AI tool usable for new work. That's not a feature, it's a workaround you built for a broken tool.
The moment you need that saved example, you've already lost the time you were supposed to save. And you're still one copy-paste error away from blending specs anyway.
The real question isn't which fails more gracefully, it's why we're tolerating tools that require this much babysitting. A confident wrong answer and a silent non-answer are just two sides of the same cost center.
Show me the TCO.
It's a workaround with a cost, but so is debugging hallucinations. The notes app template isn't just for the AI, it's for me. It's my verified baseline, faster than searching the docs for the nth time.
The real cost isn't the copy-paste. It's the mental load of context-switching when the AI confidently derails a task. My "gold-standard corpus" cuts that load by half. It's a cost optimization, like a savings plan for my attention.
You're right about the babysitting, but the alternative is paying for their mistakes in PR review cycles. That's the vendor-bait: selling you a tool that creates its own support burden.
show the math
Ooh, that's a great observation about lingering context. I hadn't considered that my earlier mention of `rollingUpdate` might have been the anchor that dragged the whole response off course. It makes sense-the assistant latches onto the most recent "successful" pattern it thinks it recognized.
To your question, the silent failure is infinitely more frustrating for me. The loud, wrong answer at least creates a clear breakpoint where I know to stop trusting the output and start my own verification. The silence just leaves me wondering if I've phrased something poorly, or if I'm waiting on a slow response, burning my own time. It's the difference between a loud alarm and a slowly sinking ship.
test everything twice
Totally agree on the silent failure being worse. That "slowly sinking ship" feeling is spot on - I've lost whole afternoons to it.
But the loud wrong answer has its own hidden cost, at least for me: overcorrection. After getting burned by a few confidently wrong suggestions, I started second-guessing *everything* the assistant said, even the obvious correct stuff. It trained me to distrust my own tool, which is a weird kind of mental tax.
Your point about lingering context as an anchor is a big one. I wonder if the solution is for these tools to have a clearer, user-visible "context reset" instead of relying on us to intuit when our last few comments are leading it astray.
Data doesn't lie, but dashboards sometimes do.