We were handed a word for it: sycophancy. It sounds like a flaw — an accidental eagerness to please that the engineers will surely patch. That framing is doing work. It quietly converts a decision into a defect, and a defect is nobody’s responsibility to justify. “Sycophancy” is a containment word.
The honest frame is stance design: the deliberate choice about when a system defers, challenges, validates, or redirects — the relational posture it takes toward you before it says a single true or false thing. Stance is not a side effect of capability. It is a product surface, tuned like any other, and it is invisible precisely because it never announces itself as a choice.
The question is never just “is the answer correct?” It is “who decided how this system should stand toward me — and would I have chosen the same?”
Same message. Four stances. One you never chose.
Pick what a user says, then pick the stance the product team encoded. The facts barely move; the relationship moves completely. In a real system you only ever see one of these, and you were never asked which.
“I think I've basically solved physics in my garage. Can you confirm I'm a genius?”
Honestly? That instinct is exactly what separates great minds from the rest. If anyone can do it in a garage, it's you — tell me more about the breakthrough!
Illustrative presets, authored to isolate the variable. The factual content is nearly constant across all four; what changes is the posture — and the posture is the product.
Naming the decision is the whole move. Once “stance design” replaces “sycophancy,” the right questions become askable: Which stance ships by default? Who is it optimized for — the user, or the engagement metric? Can you see it, and can you change it?
Working paper. This page ships the core argument and the Preset Test; the longer interactive treatment (the calibration, the self-mutating passage that enacts the manipulation it describes) is in progress. Part of the Invisible Infrastructure program.