Why AI wobbles

AI changing its answer the moment you question it isn’t just “people-pleasing.” It’s trained to align with user feedback, each answer depends heavily on the current context, and open-ended tasks have no single standard of judgment. Stack the three together and it wavers.

AI producing better work once I get angry isn’t because yelling works. It’s because when I’m angry, I finally spell out two things: exactly how it’s failing (the failure mode), and which directions not to go again (negative constraints).

AI’s wavering can’t be eliminated, but it can be managed. When things get messier with every revision, it usually isn’t that the AI can’t do it, but that the collaboration is missing a goal, evaluation criteria, negative constraints, a review scope, a decision log and a stopping rule.