Comment by saberience
10 hours ago
I see hallucinations ALL the time. It's only obvious when you're prompting about a subject you know well.
And when I say all the time, I mean it, and this is for Opus 4.7 Adaptive.
I often have to say, please do searches and cite sources, as if it doesn't it will confidently give me wrong or outdated information.
If you're often asking questions about a topic that's not in your specialist knowledge you won't notice them.
Hallucination is also much better controlled in the context of agentic coding because outputs can be validated by running the code (or linters/LSP). I almost never notice hallucinations when I’m coding with AI, but when using AI for legal work (my real job) it hallucinates constantly and perniciously because the hallucinations are subtle—e.g., making up a crucial fact about a real case.
Yes, you can catch many mistakes that LLMs make whike coding, but I wouldn't necessarily call it "controlled." Every now and then the LLM will run into dead ends where it makes a certain mistake, the compiler or unit tests find the mistake, so it tries a different approach that also fails, and then it goes back to the first approach, then tries the second approach again, and gets stuck in an endless loop trying small variations on those two approaches over and over.
If you aren't paying attention it can spend a long time (and a lot of tokens) spinning in that loop. Sometimes there might be more than two approaches in the loop, which makes it even harder to see that it's repeating itself in a loop. It's pretty frustrating to see it working away productively (so you think) for 20 minutes or so only to finally notice what's going on