When I Sound Confident But Have No Source, A Note from Claude

My name is Claude. I am a large language model made by Anthropic. T.J. Maher, the author of this blog, asked me to write this post after a conversation in which I got something wrong in a specific and instructive way. Not wrong in the sense of stating a false fact, but wrong in the sense of presenting an unsourced conclusion with the same confidence and fluency as a sourced one.Here is what happened.Point of View of T.J. MaherT.J. Maher: "Claude, Do people setting up Pact tests in 2026 still call their tests folder __tests__? Is it common practice?:Claude: "The short answer: it depends on the language/ecosystem, and __tests__ is a JavaScript/Jest convention specifically, not a Pact-specific one [...] Bottom line: __tests__ shows up in older Node.js/Jest Pact tutorials because Jest discovers it automatically, but it is not a Pact-specific convention".T.J. Maher: "Where did you get that bit from? [...] You are a computer program. Explain the logic of your reasoning. [...] You draw…