Plausible Mechanism
A causal explanation that was inferred rather than tested, and reads as more rigorous for being specific.
A plausible mechanism is an explanation of why something happens that was never verified — offered because an explanation is the natural shape of an answer, and a specific one sounds more authoritative than "I don't know".
The trap is structural rather than careless. Saying "the compiler requires this cast because the inferred type lacks the property" feels like rigour; saying "the compiler requires this and I have not established why" feels like weakness. But only the second is honest before the ten-second experiment — delete the cast, run the type checker — has been run.
Two things make the failure mode worse than it looks. First, unearned causal claims land mostly in explanatory artifacts: code comments, docblocks, review comments, change descriptions. Nothing executes against prose, so a wrong mechanism in a source file passes every gate and inherits the credibility of the gates it passed. Second, a merged change description becomes the permanent record — see Provenance.
The rule that survives: before writing "because X", run something that would tell you if X were false. If you cannot, write what you observed and say the cause is not established. When a reviewer asks why, that question is the trigger to go find out, not permission to guess more precisely.
See also7
Hand-picked in the note itself — the neighbours worth reading next.
Falsifiability
A claim is only worth something if you know what observation would refute it.
Method16 connections
Exhaustive Claim
A statement of the form "the last one" or "nothing else does this" — load-bearing, and only as good as the search behind it.
Method13 connections
Ground Truth
The measurement that arbitrates, as opposed to the artifact that merely reports.
Method30 connections
Code Comment
Prose inside source code, useful only when it records a constraint the code cannot state.
Method9 connections
Hallucination
Fluent, confident output that is not grounded in anything real.
Agents & Language Models12 connections
Code Review
A second person reading a change before it lands, and the practices that make it worth the time.
Version Control & Delivery15 connections
Adversarial Review
Reviewing work with an explicit mandate to refute it, from a perspective that did not produce it.
Agents & Language Models9 connections
Related2
Nearby in the graph rather than deliberately chosen. Looser, sometimes surprising.
Linked from17
Notes elsewhere in the wiki that reach for this one.
- Adversarial ReviewAgents & Language Models
Reviewing work with an explicit mandate to refute it, from a perspective that did not produce it.
- Anchoring EffectMethod
A stated number pulls subsequent estimates toward it, regardless of relevance.
- Atomic CommitVersion Control & Delivery
A commit containing exactly one logical change, complete and independently sound.
- Chesterton's FenceMethod
Do not remove something whose purpose you cannot explain.
- Code CommentMethod
Prose inside source code, useful only when it records a constraint the code cannot state.
- Code ReviewVersion Control & Delivery
A second person reading a change before it lands, and the practices that make it worth the time.
- CommitVersion Control & Delivery
A recorded snapshot of a project with a message explaining it.
- Conventional CommitsVersion Control & Delivery
A lightweight convention giving commit messages a machine-readable type and scope.
- Documentation RotMethod
Documentation that has drifted from the system it describes, and is now worse than none.
- Exhaustive ClaimMethod
A statement of the form "the last one" or "nothing else does this" — load-bearing, and only as good as the search behind it.
- FalsifiabilityMethod
A claim is only worth something if you know what observation would refute it.
- HallucinationAgents & Language Models
Fluent, confident output that is not grounded in anything real.
- Linguistic RelativityMeaning & Society
The hypothesis that language shapes thought, and the evidence that has narrowed it considerably.
- ProvenanceMethod
The recorded origin of a change or a claim — who made it, when, and on what evidence.
- Root Cause AnalysisMethod
Escalating past the visible symptom until you find the layer that actually produced it.
- Squash MergeVersion Control & Delivery
Collapsing a branch's commits into one before merging, trading granularity for a clean main history.
- Technical DebtMethod
The future cost of a present shortcut, metaphorically accruing interest.