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AI-assisted development is genuinely useful. It’s also very good at helping you waste a day on a wrong answer. While working on SP-MembershipManager, I kept running into inconsistent results when querying a user’s SharePoint site access. One run would return 19 sites. The next would return 8. Then 20. Then 12. No pattern, no obvious error — just noise. I asked Claude what was going on. It was confident: SharePoint replication lag. Data takes time to propagate across the service, results can be inconsistent during that window, etc. It sounded plausible. The whole point of this tool is to give non-technical users a reliable view of their permissions, so I really didn’t want it to be true, but it sounded true. ...

A client of mine needed help managing SharePoint site access. Nothing complicated — add a user here, remove one there, maybe a few times a year. The problem was they’re self-admittedly low-tech and had no business being handed admin center rights just to flip a few permissions. Teaching them the SharePoint admin center wasn’t a real solution. It’s overkill for what they needed, and frankly not worth the support calls. So I built something simpler. ...