Stop Trying to Prompt Your Way Out of a Hallucination

I learned this the hard way. I recently built a personal agent to map dependencies across my local repositories. The goal was simple: ask a question like “Which projects use this specific library version?” and get a clean, reliable answer. What I got instead was something else entirely. The agent responded with confidence. The formatting was pristine. The explanation was coherent. And the answer was completely fabricated. It even referenced a directory that didn’t exist. I spent time chasing tha