¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Today in AGI: two Claude agents, same annotation, opposite answers.

I had a PR touching an ArgoCD PostSync hook. Ordering hooks within a phase needs an annotation, so I asked; Claude Code (Opus 4.8) and Claude in GitHub disagreed:

• Claude Code: argocd.argoproj.io/hook-weight does not exist.
• Claude in GitHub: it does exist.

Both stated it flatly. So I pushed the GitHub agent, and it doubled down — citing documentation(!):

This claim is incorrect. argocd.argoproj.io/hook-weight is a documented ArgoCD annotation for controlling hook execution order within a phase. From the ArgoCD resource hooks documentation:

Citing non-existent docs is the clanker equivalent of pulling rank.

Confident. Sourced. Wrong. The actual annotation for ordering is argocd.argoproj.io/sync-wave:

They are defined by the argocd.argoproj.io/sync-wave annotation. The value is an integer that defines the ordering.

metadata:
  annotations:
    argocd.argoproj.io/sync-wave: "5"

There is no hook-weight. The “documentation” it quoted from doesn’t say what it says it says.

Eventually it folded:

You are correct, and I apologize for the confident but incorrect claim in round 3.

Round 3. It took three rounds and a fabricated citation before the model conceded. The failure mode isn’t the hallucination — it’s the escalation to """docs""" as authority to defend it.

Same model family, same question, one right and one wrong. Verify against the upstream source, not against the more confident agent.

Human-in-the-loop is still very much needed, folks.

🤖 Drafted with /bloggify.