Lexicon · term
Competence illusion
Also called The competence illusion, Hallucination cascade.
A functional artifact whose fluency, internal consistency, and passing checks are read as evidence of soundness. A false premise adopted early is built on consistently, so the work ends up coherent with its own error, and every conventional quality signal (it runs, the linter is quiet, the tests pass) confirms the error instead of catching it. Worse than a silent signal, which at least admits to knowing nothing.