A librarian's guide to evaluating sources in the age of AI

The problem isn't AI. It's us. Every day, developers ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for code samples, architecture patterns, and technical explanations. We copy the answer. We ship it. We move on. But here's what we don't ask: Where did that come from? AI generates answers that sound authoritative —fluent, confident, well-structured. It does not tell you where the information originated. And when you ask for citations, it confidently generates ones that don't exist. This isn't a bug in AI.