Guarding the Henhouse: Testing AI in Regulated Industries — feat. Erick Herring (Vynyl)

Show notes

When your chatbot answers legal or medical questions, "close enough" isn't a spec — it's a lawsuit. Erick Herring of Vynyl joins Kuba and Alex to unpack what it actually takes to build and assure LLM-based systems for healthcare, lending, insurance and legal clients. Drawing on a career that spans punch cards, the birth of the commercial web and today's AI frenzy, Erick argues that the fundamentals of accountability haven't changed — but the way we hold code writers (now AI) accountable has, opening the door to formal verification, 100% test coverage and rigorous pre/post-condition testing that were never practical with human-only teams. He makes the case that "red teaming" is the wrong frame — this is AI assurance, spanning hallucination, bias and reliability, not just jailbreaks — and that QA can no longer be a discrete step but a continuous process fed by unified observability. Along the way: why guardrail code deserves more scrutiny than production code, the "ontological reframing" paper on talking an AI past its safety guardrails, the "yes, yes, yes" developer psychology that erodes PR review, and why QA engineers are more necessary now, not less. A grounded, contrarian take o