2nd March 2025 A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full software library that doesn’t exist—and it crashed their confidence in LLMs as a tool for writing code. How could anyone productively use

When computer scientist Andy Zou researches artificial intelligence (AI), he often asks a chatbot to suggest background reading and references. But this doesn’t always go well. “Most of the time, it gives me different authors than the ones it should, or maybe sometimes the paper doesn’t exist at all,” says Zou, a graduate student at