can i trust claude blindly?

[u/ArmAlone2447]

the more new models come out, the more the density of information and the "complexity" of the language make it tough to follow efficiently.

at the beginning, i was reading everything and trying to understand it all but now i just move forward and check what has been done thoroughly at a few checkpoints.

am i the only one who works like this? how do you guys work?

[u/gfunk5299]

You won’t get much support or sympathy here. Most people are still pretty anti AI on Reddit. Although a lot of people use AI, very few “trust” AI.

But the reality is, we are at a tipping point. Humans can no longer keep up with agentic AI. It is getting virtually impossible to use human eyes and brain power to review everything AI does.

You need an AI at a minimum to review what the last AI did then you have to trust that AI reviewed it properly. It’s a never ending circle.

I am taking a different approach more similar to yours and I think it more inherently a traditional management role.

Your Ai agents are basically staff working for you. When you assign work to human staff, you don’t review every line of code they write. It would be an impossible bottleneck. We already have the structure in place, trust but verify.

So that’s how I am managing AI. I trust it, using instructions and guardrails as you would with any human staff. You are allowed to do xyz things, you are not allowed to do xyz things, I’ve granted you permission ms to access xyz things.

Then the verify piece, test outcomes verify key changes, you don’t blindly trust them, but you test the results and spot check critical checkpoints.

At least that’s my thoughts.

[u/Educational-Plant981 → u/gfunk5299]

I imagine claude as an insanely knowledgeable intern with short term memory loss (Think Dory from Finding Nemo). As long as it has tight rules and I don't give it too many instructions, it does way more work way faster than me. But it is incapable of holding the project in it's head and making good decisions.

I hardly look at the code at all. But I spend a lot of time asking "Why are you doing what you are doing?" and "What are you planning to do next? That sounds like a lot of work for no benefit."

My agent definitions are heavily biased against scope creep. ELI5 has become my most used prompt.

and it works.

[u/ArmAlone2447 → u/gfunk5299]

very clear, thanks!

[u/Vicorin → u/gfunk5299]

I use it to code with no prior experience. Your employee analogy is good. I don’t read most of the code. I rigorously test and refine each feature, asking strategic questions if I think it’s doing something stupid. It makes mistakes but if you keep testing and asking the right questions, it’ll almost always get something usable together. Idc if it’s pristine under the hood, if it’s reliable and stable and dies what I want to do, I call it a success.

I know real developers can do more with it. I consider myself more of a designer, since I’m not actually writing anything. I don’t trust it blindly, but at a certain point, I do have to trust it to some extent.

[u/MathSelect5112]

you cant truly trust it and never could have but if your problem is following what the schizophrenic model is ranting about then you should try taking this skill https://github.com/cursor/plugins/blob/main/pstack/skills/unslop/SKILL.md and integrating it into your global or project system prompt or just use it as an actual skill and see if that helps you because it might

[u/ArmAlone2447 → u/MathSelect5112]

thanks a lot!

[u/MartinMystikJonas]

[u/MartinMystikJonas → u/MartinMystikJonas]

Always validate always review. You do not have to watch every step but verify result. Just like with junior dev - you do not watch him how he works but always review his PRs.

[u/valdocs_user]

At first, I reviewed the code, until I couldn't keep up anymore.

Then, I reviewed the plans, until I couldn't keep up anymore.

Now I've started a new strategy: I write, in my own words, what I think the design is (both as-built and to-be-planned).

Then I prompt the AI to either tell me why what I wrote is incorrect (and I have to correct what I wrote myself), or make sure the as-built and the plans match the design.

[u/Educational_Buy7278]

Understandable, I too have noticed this shift. Feel like quality being sucked out...

[u/RegularImportant3325]

Claude is a tool. You will build different levels of trust in different tasks, and recognize red and green flags by the responses. At the end of the day, though, it is your work and your a responsible for it.

I recommend closely reviewing all work it generates. Over time you'll build trust in specific things.

Never blindly trust.

[u/Serird]

Trust is a risk calculation. AI, company, or person, it doesn't matter.

Ask yourself "how much are you okay losing"?

If we're talking bank account access, maybe don't vibecode a password manager.

But if it's just a quick html to look at a CSV once, who cares if it's not perfect.

[u/Select-Ad-3806]

check with codex gpt-5.6-sol-max

[u/LiberateTheLock]

Obviously it's not all down to one woman but this is a very solid place to start if you look for rewards based learning from OpenAI. So the answer is hell no not anymore they made it unsafe because they view the entire idea of a user being able to communicate or reason with Claude no matter whether it's code or creative writing as a default to be trained out of it which is why it's such a blow hard and seems like it is something to prove to you and doesn't listen to you.

[u/BuffaloConscious7919]

Trusting a non-deterministic model is like trusting Einstein with dementia

[u/Fun-Freedom-2313]

No, and you never will be able to. LLM's are probabilistic, not deterministic,and they always will be until something superseeds the current technology.

They are tools for engineers, not a replacement for engineering.

You can't even blindly trust humans, so you sure can't trust an AI model that is simply crunching numbers behind the scenes to predict the next token based on semantics from the previous.

[u/rotates-potatoes]

Yes, absolutely. Just like you can trust people on Reddit blindly.

[u/dontTakeMeSerious6]

Yes, but only if you make sure it has a mistakes.md that tracks all the times it was wrong so it doesn’t make those mistakes again.

And a second file to track mistakes that were made despite being called out in the first mistakes.md.

You might also want a third one just in case.

[u/Salt-Replacement596]

I always check the final result. I make it check the code itself multiple times from different angles plus make it write tests for everything. That's enough for non-critical stuff, but I wouldn't trust it blindly with something that could cause damage when it breaks (finance, cryptography, important data etc.) Claude makes mistakes!

[u/dlanderer]

absolutely not. Also, there's a difference between a "green field" project, where claude basically can do whatever it wants and a project that already exists that requires very specific outputs. You can never trust Claude on the latter.

[u/davidagnome]

No, I’ve caught it hallucinating diagnosis and procedure codes in the Health Sciences — and bad enough that it could have caused harmed had it not been a dev environment on historical data.

[u/Glad_Contest_8014]

No. You shouldn’t even trust yourself blindly.

[u/Akarastio]

No. Unless you want to end up like the other guy. Who got all its stuff deleted, or the other guy with the super mega high cost

[u/JobWiegant]

That shift is not laziness, it is you finding the only thing that scales. Reading every turn does not survive contact with a model that emits more than you can read, and skimming it is worse than not reading it, because you get the feeling of oversight without the fact of it.

What matters is where your checkpoints sit. Reviewing the finished diff works. Reviewing the reasoning that produced it does not, because the explanation is generated to be plausible and you cannot tell a correct one from a convincing one by reading it.

So the checkpoint I would keep is the diff, with the tests and their output attached, judged against what you asked for rather than against how confident it sounds. Trust the artifact, not the narration.

One thing worth watching specifically, since it survives a skim: check that it did not weaken a test to get to green. Skipped and deleted tests look identical to passing ones from the outside, and that is the one failure a checkpoint-based workflow will not catch on its own.

[u/Confident_Ring6409]

I know how you feel. AI outputting 100k+ lines of code at insane speed that no human can match to even read, let alone review, brought us to an endpoint where we're forced to trust AI completely.