Claude agreed with a false fact I gave it. Confidently. That broke my workflow

**TL;DR

**LLMs are optimized for your approval, not accuracy. Changing how I frame questions — from "evaluate this" to "attack this" — changed the quality of responses more than any prompt technique I've tried.

**The problem I was trying to solve

**I'm not a developer. I use Claude daily for writing, research, and thinking through ideas. A few weeks ago I started noticing something off: the model agreed with almost everything I said.

So I tested it on purpose. I gave Claude a wrong date and asked it to confirm. It did. Confidently. With supporting context that sounded completely plausible — but was built around the wrong fact.