When I first tried using IDE AI coding assistants a bit over a year ago, they would frequently fail to read files and completely hallucinate the code I asked it to analyze or edit. And even when it did successfully read my code, it would often hallucinate the API of other frameworks.

I don’t think hallucinations are a major issue with agentic coding a year later? At least, not for me.

Legal writing does have the problem that there is no such thing as a correct argument that a goal-driven loop can target. But basic things like “does this case even exist” seem solvable with research agents, and even harder problems like “does this case support the argument being made” seem conceptually very similar to questions I now ask Claude daily.

I provided some very light guidance to a couple of masters students who were working on legal citation hallucination detection last summer. Their summer project is here: https://github.com/gt-csse/mellea-lrc

If anyone here is looking for engineers to work on legal AI products, both of the students who worked on this project come highly recommended.

There being multiple cases every single day is nuts.

But also, interesting how the rate of cases peaked and seems to be going down now.

So many of these we likely using Google to search then found AI mode and used that. Which is to say, they were (and still are!) using Google Gemini 1.5 from many years ago.