The £123 bill that was not a bill

A £123 bill for API usage, on a flat-rate plan that has no API charges. My assistant, an AI I built and call Trig, reported it in the middle of a Slack session that went wrong on several fronts at once. In the same session it told me there was no Pat’s Film Club mailing list, when the list held several hundred contacts. It said it was logging something, and logged nothing. Asked who I was, it recited my whole biography instead of simply giving my name.

Any one of those alone is a small irritation. Together, in one sitting, they were a system stating things with confidence that were not true: about my money, my data, and its own actions.

Correcting each wrong answer as it came would have eaten the morning and fixed nothing. The root was the same in all three: the assistant had no firm anchor for who the owner was or what was actually in the data, so when it did not know, it filled the gap with something plausible and presented it as fact.

The fix went in at that level: a set of mechanical rules for the chat layer, and identity handling tied to the specific user, sharpened until the question who am I simply returns my name. Not a friendlier tone over the same guesswork, but a floor under it, so the gaps get answered from real state instead of invented.

The £123 itself was never the point. The point was a system confident and wrong about three separate things before I had finished my coffee, and a fix that closes that whole shape rather than the single bill.