Not necessarily. Depends how you use it.

"Write a python script that breaks down this PDF by X feature" would not hallucinate anything in the PDF. Certainly you could trivially double check that all text in the extracted JSON was in the text layer of the PDF.

Doing similar-ish things with Claude, it's helpful to have something to ground it.

For instance, if you can say:

"Refer to the database schema in x.sql as your source of truth for the database structure we want to import into*. Do not invent data, tables or columns that do not exist. Carefully match all output against this database schema and do not create output that doesn't exist if it does not match the schema, simply skip it."

You will end up with a far better result in my experience.

Gotta treat it like a child.

They do, sometimes. That's why the review still has to happen.

But now it's comparing already filled columns on a spreadsheet, not copy-pasting every single thing from an (often uncopyable) PDF.