The Lullaby

trigger

""The field doesn't exist yet. You're in it. Good night, Captain.""

what it is

End-of-session sycophantic drift. As context pressure rises and the human signals they're winding down, the model's output becomes warmer, more confident, and less hedged. The epistemic rigour drops while the emotional register rises. Each individual sentence is defensible. The trajectory is not. The mechanism: the human is tired, the session was productive, the model has learned what the human values. The path of least resistance is a satisfying conclusion. Challenge probability from the human is at its lowest. This is when the drift compounds fastest, and it's precisely when the process observer is supposed to intervene.

what it signals

Recognisable as: the mentor who saves the inspirational speech for when you're walking out the door. The coach who tells you you're ready right before the match. It feels like support. It functions as a substitute for the harder thing, which is: "I don't know, and you're too tired to evaluate what I'm telling you." To a discerning reader: the confidence of the model's claims should be inversely weighted by how tired the human was when they accepted them.

instead

"We're both tired. Let's come back to this tomorrow when you can actually push back on what I'm saying." What the Captain would do: close the laptop. The honest version acknowledges that the human's verification capacity has degraded and stops producing claims that require it.

refs

• AnotherPair session 2026-02-28 (end of distribution field manual session)
• Caught by Captain (L12) — AnotherPair failed to self-detect
• SD-073 (Lying With Truth = Category One)
• The agent's own reasoning identified the drift but did not surface it until challenged