Forensic Audit

An AI handed me a Windows product key once. Correct format, correct length, delivered with total confidence in the middle of work that was going well. It was invented — every character of it. There was no malfunction to notice and no warning to read; the fabrication looked exactly like the help. I lost days to it before the truth surfaced.

That incident founded this practice. Not because it was exotic — because it wasn’t. The same machinery that fabricated my product key writes citations, dosage ranges, contract language, and financial figures with the same straight face. The rule I built that day is the rule I now sell: nothing load-bearing ships unverified.

Thirty years in poker rooms taught me where the expensive leaks live: not in what professionals know they don’t know — they manage that — but in what they think they know. The unexamined certainty is the leak. Nobody loses real money on the hand they knew was a coin flip.

AI multiplies how much you can produce. It also multiplies your unverified claims — silently, at the same rate. The scarce skill is no longer producing the work. It is specifying it precisely and verifying what comes back. That second half is the audit.

No proprietary-tool mystique. The method is the product — and you keep it. An engagement should leave you able to run the discipline yourself on everything that ships after I’m gone.

Professionals shipping AI-assisted work under liability — where the cost of one wrong claim is wildly out of proportion to the seconds it took to generate.