Reader, This is a story all about how our weekend got turned upside down...
With the Memorial Day weekend washout on the East Coast, Brian and I scratched our cabin plans and decided to finally tackle a project we'd been putting off: custom built-ins for our den.
I had a brilliant idea. I would use Claude to build the full project plan. Shopping list, cut list with every dimension, pricing from Home Depot, step-by-step instructions. It was impressive.
Brian has always been an AI skeptic. I thought this was going to be my moment to shine and save him a lot of effort.
We spent $900 at Home Depot Friday. He turned our parking spot in our garage into a workshop and spent the rest of Friday and most of Saturday batching all the cuts so we could bring everything upstairs at once. I left to grab lunch. I came back to a man staring at a screen surrounded by lumber that was all the wrong size.
The math wasn't mathing.
Claude had miscalculated the base measurement that every other dimension was built on. It hadn't accounted for the actual width of a 2x4 in the foundational structure, which meant every single cut Brian had made was wrong.
When I raised it with Claude, it told me Brian made the wrong cuts. That Brian didn't follow the instructions. That Brian was the problem.
When Claude finally admitted to f-ing up!
If Brian wasn't already pissed, that sealed it. My AI skeptic husband is now a full-on AI hater. And I cannot entirely blame him.
Here is the part that stings a little: I literally taught a workshop last week and talked about AI gaslighting. About how confidently wrong it can be. About why you still have to check the work. Then I handed my husband a full AI-generated construction plan like Claude was a licensed contractor with a union card.
We went back to Home Depot to get new lumber and because the cuts needed to be more precise the second time, a table saw.
Total damage: $1,446.79.
This is my GoFundMe:
I’d been thinking about building the AI Slop Detector for a while. The bones were already there. This weekend just forced me to finish the pour. Because if someone who literally teaches AI strategy can hand her husband $1,446 worth of confidently wrong instructions, we officially need a better way to check the math.
The AI Slop Detector is the tool I wish I’d used before Brian turned our garage into a lumber graveyard. It’s a custom GPT and Claude skill trained to catch the stuff AI slips past people when they’re moving too fast: the polished-but-empty phrasing, the weirdly confident lies, the repetitive sentence loops, the missing specificity, the “this sounds smart until you actually think about it” energy.
It checks your voice, catches the AI fingerprints spreading through everyone’s content right now, and tells you where to slow down and verify before a chatbot talks you into buying a table saw you didn’t plan on owning.
It's $97. This week only, use code SAVEMYMARRIAGE at checkout and get it for $47.
Help me recoup my losses. More importantly, stop letting AI gaslight you.
P.S. Brian has not yet come around on AI. I'm working on it. In the meantime, at least one of us will have a tool that checks the math.
✨Pull up a seat. It’s time to pour your signature brand.✨
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