There’s a documented bias called the illusion of explanatory depth: people are confident they understand how something works — a zip, a bicycle, a piece of legislation — right up until you ask them to walk through it step by step, at which point the gaps show up in real time and surprise the person who has them (The Decision Lab). It was first studied on mechanical objects. It applies just as well to anything you didn’t build yourself and have never had to account for out loud, which increasingly describes most of what shows up on a screen in front of us.
I watched a live version of this recently — a young presenter working through a deck that had clearly been generated for the talk rather than by the person giving it, and it showed. He fumbled his way through slide after slide because he hadn’t sat with the material closely enough to know what was coming next, and the deck had no patience for that — it just kept advancing whether he was ready or not. It wasn’t that the content was wrong. Nobody in the room could have told you that from the outside. It was that the first time his understanding of his own talk got tested was live, in front of people, and it failed the test in real time.
I try to build that test into my own work before anyone else gets to see it. If a model hands me something — a plan, a script, an analysis — my first move isn’t to accept it and move on, it’s to go find out what it actually is. Increasingly I’ll deliberately point a model at my own reasoning and ask it to take it apart: where’s the assumption I haven’t checked, where’s the step I’ve skipped past because it felt obvious. It’s an uncomfortable habit on purpose. The discomfort is the part that’s doing the work — it’s the only way I find the thin patches in my own understanding before a client does.
That’s the actual test for anything you build for someone else, AI-assisted or not: can you explain it, unscripted, to a person who’s going to ask a follow-up question you didn’t prepare for. Not “I could explain this if pressed” — actually doing it out loud, and noticing exactly where you start hand-waving. Those are the spots where you understood the shape of the thing but not the substance. Better to find that out at your own desk, with nobody watching, than on a deck you haven’t rehearsed.