ChatGPT Made Up a Python Function: Can You Trust AI for Code?
Ask by Anubhav Sharma
Updated 02 Sep 2026
Welcome to the club. It's not lying to you on purpose, it's just that it learned from code written across many years and versions, and sometimes it blends them together or fills a gap with something that sounds right.
What changed things for me was telling it my exact setup at the top: Python version, library versions, operating system. That alone cut the nonsense a lot. Second, when something breaks, paste the actual error message. Don't say "doesn't work", paste the full traceback. It's very good at reading those.
Third, and this is the real answer, don't trust any function you haven't seen before. Takes 30 seconds to check the docs. And for anything that matters, ask it to write a quick test along with the code. If the test fails, you've caught it before it bites you.
Well, AI is going to get much better at coding too. We just need to keep using it, testing the code, and giving it feedback when something goes wrong. In the next few years, I believe AI coding tools will become much more sophisticated and will be able to handle a large part of the development work. We’ll still need developers to review and guide them, but the whole coding process is going to become much faster and easier.