Verification is a habit

Verification gets talked about like a final quality check — the step you do after the real work is finished. In AI-assisted work, that framing is backwards. The checking is the work. Everything before it is drafting.

A habit of verification means testing the claim against something that did not come from the model: a source, a calculation, a colleague, a prior result. It means treating a confident-sounding answer as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion, by default, every time — not only when something feels off.

"That is a harder skill to teach than prompting, and a much more durable one. Tools change; the discipline of not trusting an answer just because it was delivered fluently does not.