One of my kids recently had a no-contact knee injury while playing basketball. He immediately started limping and crying and I had to carry him from the court to the car.

I did some searching with Grok and I found out:

- no contact injuries are troubling b/c it generally means they pulled something

- kids don't generally tear an ACL (or other ligament)

- it's actually way more common for the ligament to pull the anchor point off of the bigger bone b/c kid bones are soft

I asked it to differentially diagnose the issue with the details of: can't hold weight, little to no swelling and some pain.

It was adamant, ADAMANT, that this was a classic case of bone being pulled off by the ligament and that it would require surgery. It even pointed out the no swelling could be due to a very small tear etc. It gave me a 90% chance of surgery too.

I followed up by asking what test would definitely prove it one way or the other and it mentioned getting an X-Ray.

We go off to the urgent care, son is already kind of hobbling around. Doctor says he seems fine, I push for an X-Ray and turns out no issue: he probably just pulled something. He was fully healed in 2-3 days.

As someone who has done a lot of differential diagnosing/troubleshooting of big systems (FinTech SRE) I find it interesting that it was basically correct in what could have happened but couldn't go the "final mile" to establish it correctly. Once we start hooking up X-Rays to Claude/Grok 4.2 etc equivalent LLMs, will be even more interesting to see where this goes.