I can't remember who it was I spoke to recently, but it was some startup for doing code reviews. So I asked how they're handling larger diffs and especially when a code change is related to something requiring knowing a lot of context. Will it hallucinate things that make the review low-quality, etc. I was told "no it's been given guardrails to prevent hallucinations. it doesn't hallucinate." but I was thinking, that's not really how LLMs do or do not hallucinate, is it? (I'm not an AI person so I really don't know).

It's like the frog prompting the scorpion not to sting him as they cross the river. Or like when image models used to routinely draw human hands incorrectly and you'd see these "prompt hacks" that would essentially be stuffed with phrases like NO DEFORMED FINGERS, NO ELDRITCH HORRORS!

You can reduce hallucinations with appropriate grounding checks. You can’t really get rid of them though, so feedback loops with verification are essential.

Good point, thanks. Of course I was not able to fully eliminate hallucinations, but significantly reduce

You can reduce hallucinations with rules and guardrailes for sure.

And Anthropic clearly shows that we can reduce hallucination in models. Progress is made which you can see in benchmarks.

And at the end of the day, a normal human being doesn't 'hallucinate' but 'missunderstand' things or just doesn't know what they are missing.

A LLM doesn't has to be perfect, it just has to be cheaper with the min. same quality as a human.

So why are you screaming into the void? Because LLM leave deterministic world? A lot of people don't even life in that world anyway.

you can by making a different - usually local small - model ask for verification

I hear you! I read the article and thought the same thing because I've actually built a surprisingly similar pipeline myself, but it culminates with Human review. I've got a trivia app (Hedge Calibrated Trivia) whose whole content pipeline is built on a similar architecture of models evaluating models. I didn't want the same trivia that every other app has and I naively imagined that it would be easy to ask an LLM to give me questions. Turns out when you ask an LLM for trivia questions, the FIRST thing it gives you are the same questions every other app asks!

After iterating into many of the same problems OP describes I settled into a similar pipeline. I generate questions with Gemini 3.5 flash and review with Claude. The different vendor generation and validation eliminates training holes in a single model solution. This is True/False trivia so I ask for an equal mix of True/False questions and also ask for alternate phrasing of the question to the opposite variant. Each statement must provide an explanation and sources which back up the claim. I pass in my existing dataset as questions to avoid, but found the model then rewording the questions or category shopping the questions into related categories in an attempt to re-use them. That led to using Claude Sonnet to check for duplicate "themes" and similar topics. Claude also acts as a critic of the question and the explanation. Sometimes Gemini's "thoughts" leak into the explanation. The critic catches these leaks and also catches "weak" questions (basically shapes that I have identified via examples as lazy or projecting the answer in the question). Once the comparative models have stripped out anything obviously bad, my server curls the source URLs and uses Sonnet to verify that the fetched source supports the claim. Any URL that doesn't resolve throws up flags, and I found Gemini was particularly bad at inventing source URLs for sports trivia. Updated prompting directed it to prefer Wiki links over its fabricated deep links into league websites, which helped immensely. Still one of the biggest tells in review is that the URLs don't resolve or don't confirm the statement.

But review is the entire point here. I have to review them all. A question that lands in the app and is wrong reflects terribly. So while I have a trivia app on the App Store, the real complex App is my private admin app that lets me sit on the couch swiping through each and every question sorted by the model's confidence in its own quality and correctness (weakest first). No question makes it into my bank without me reading, checking all the indicators that came from the models and potentially even rewriting the question to make it better. It all happens in the admin app and exists entirely to prevent hallucinations from reaching real users. Early on I was maybe accepting 1 in 3 questions generated, but I'm probably closer to 2/3rds now. Of course not every dismissed question is wrong. The quality checks I've put in the pipeline are probably giving me 80% questions that are correct and sourced, but sometimes they just aren't what I'm looking for or don't meet my standard.

The best thing I ever did was make an app to review these questions though. Sitting on the couch, kick off a question generation, come back 20 minutes later with 50+ questions in the queue. Sort through them and pull out the 30 best when I have the time. That's the real anti-hallucinations pipeline.

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