Author of Record

The model can write every word. It can't sign it.

I heard a story about a long, careful, genuinely good conversation someone had with their LLM about a problematic SQL query. The answer, correctly, was an index. The model wrote the statement. The statement was right.

The developer copied it into DataGrip and ran it.

Several hundred million rows. Writes frozen. For hours. In production.

The SQL was right. But building an index on a table that size stops every write to it while it runs, and on a busy system, that's an outage.

The fix is one word — CONCURRENTLY — or a maintenance window, or any of a handful of obvious things. Nobody said it, because nobody mentioned it was production, or how big the table was.

It didn't come up.

Maybe you don't write SQL. Doesn't matter. Swap the index for a contract clause, a forecast, a headline number. The shape holds.

Usually when a model burns you, you can point at something. A confident answer that turned out to be invented, delivered in the same tone as a correct one. You can catch that. Everybody knows they'd catch that.

Here there was nothing to catch. Correct diagnosis, correct SQL, two-hour outage. Nothing in the answer, at least.

So who's accountable?

The person who hit execute. It isn't close, and it never is.

And one day that's you. Correct answer on the screen, your name on the outage.

The model has no idea whose name goes at the bottom.

It has no stake in any of it.

It cannot be wrong. Being wrong requires having been the one who was supposed to be right.

You were the one supposed to be right.

This is why "the model wrote that" isn't a defense. It's a confession. Nobody in the room will accept it, and you'd think less of them if they did. The output has no author until you adopt it. The instant you ship it, you did. Every word, whether you read it or not.

You were hired for what you think.

There is no version of this job where the machine's answer counts as yours by default and a wrong one becomes yours by surprise. Use it to sharpen a position. Don't use it to avoid having one.

And when you do use it, use all of it. Build the deck, generate the outline, the first ugly pass, the speaker notes. There is no honor in typing, and I don't care how the words got onto the slide.

But you are the author of record. Every slide, every claim, every number.

The tool can produce every word. It cannot produce the name at the bottom. The only part that was ever the point.

Bring that.