We’ve spent the last couple of years treating generative AI like a vending machine. Select a task. Insert a prompt. Retrieve a product. And to be fair, in many legal and professional contexts that’s exactly the right frame: accuracy and precision matter and “creative” output in payroll or billing codes is usually just a polished

I had a long session recently with a public genAI tool that taught me something more important than the topic I started with.

The lesson was not about whether the model was “smart enough.” It was about control. At a certain point, I realized I was no longer simply prompting an LLM. I was negotiating