We’ve all been there. You type a prompt into an AI tool, watch the cursor fly across the screen, and think, “Wow, the future is here. I just saved myself three hours of work.”
And then, reality hits. Or in my case, a massive stack of return mail hits.
Here at Engine Web Development in Grand Rapids, we’ve been building websites and writing custom software for 21 years. We have clients all over Michigan, and our developers are brilliant at what they do. Do they use AI? Absolutely. They use it as a tool to speed up repetitive tasks. But because they actually know how to code, they can spot the exact moment AI goes off the rails and hallucinates a broken line of script.
Me? I’m not a programmer. I do the management. And recently, I had a great idea to design some postcards and mail them out to local businesses to see if we could help them with their websites.
The first time I did this, I did it the old-fashioned way. I spent two hours researching, verifying, and building a list of 50 local businesses. I mailed the postcards. Out of 50, maybe 3 came back as a bad address. Not bad.
The next time, I thought I’d be smart. I opened up AI.
“Give me a spreadsheet of local businesses in West Michigan,” I instructed. I set the parameters. A few seconds later, a gorgeous, clean spreadsheet popped up. It looked absolutely perfect. It had tool and die shops, eye doctors, hair salons, manufacturing companies, restaurants, and electricians. The geography was exactly what I wanted: Grandville, Ada, Grand Rapids, Hudsonville, Wyoming, Allendale.
I printed out the labels, patting myself on the back for being a tech-forward manager who just saved herself two hours of manual labor.
But AY AY AY!!!
A few days later, the mail started coming back. Then more came back. Eventually, I received almost all of them back.
WHAT???!!!??
So what happened? I sat down and started manually looking up these companies to see where the glitch was. What I found was mind-boggling: many of these companies DO NOT EVEN EXIST!
It wasn’t just a case of AI getting a digit wrong in a zip code or misspelling a street name. The software had completely fabricated businesses out of thin air. They simply aren’t companies in Michigan, period. For the ones that were real, the addresses were completely mangled—placing a real business in the wrong town or assigning it to a street it has never lived on.
AI didn’t just give me a bad list; it confidently lied to me with a smile on its face.
This is what the tech industry calls an “AI hallucination,” but for business owners, it’s just a massive waste of time and postage stamps.
Why Tech Needs a Human Touch
This postcard experiment reminded me exactly why Engine Web Development has thrived in West Michigan for over two decades.
AI is a great assistant, but it is a terrible boss. It lacks context, it lacks local knowledge, and most importantly, it lacks a pulse. It can generate a beautifully formatted spreadsheet in three seconds flat, but it has no idea if that “Tool & Die Shop” in Hudsonville is an actual brick-and-mortar building or just a collection of random words it stitched together.
Our developers at Engine use AI as a tool to speed up repetitive tasks. But because they actually know how to code and have 21 years of experience, they can spot the exact millisecond AI goes off the rails. They know how to override the machine because they understand the logic behind it.
We are being told today that artificial intelligence is a total replacement for human labor. We see it in our inboxes every day—impersonal, automated sales emails written by bots that no real person ever reads or responds to. It feels like the tech world has become a giant ghost town of automated systems talking to other automated systems, while real customers are left stranded, screaming into the void of an unhelpful chatbot.
Sticking to Our Lane
At Engine, we pride ourselves on real people and real availability. We don’t hide behind automated ticketing bots or send you generic, AI-generated website templates that look great on paper but fail the moment a real customer tries to use them. We stick to our lane, doing what we do best: high-level, human-verified custom software programming and web development.
Technology should connect us, not build walls of automated frustration.
If you are reading this and you aren’t a current client yet, please reach out! A real, live human being right here in Michigan would absolutely love to talk to you—mostly because I honestly don’t know when I’ll have the energy to make more postcards to replace all of these wasted ones! But hey, once I finally get the time to do some good, old-fashioned human research, you might just see a real postcard from me in your mailbox. Until then, beat me to the punch and reach out today.
And to our current clients: If you ever have questions or want to brainstorm some new options to take your website or custom software idea to the next level, you know exactly where to find us. Give us a call or drop me an email anytime (michelle@runenegine.com)—we’re always here and ready to talk shop.
(And did I use AI to write a little of this blog? ABSOLUTELY. 😉 Like I said… it’s a great tool!)