I Built a Framework to Stress-Test an AI Co-Founder. Here’s What 5 Days Revealed.

A solo founder’s field notes on what AI gets right, where it breaks, and how to tell the difference. Both responses are fluent. Only one is honest. The Epporul Plumbline Protocol flags the difference. The Problem Nobody Talks About We’ve gotten remarkably good at getting AI to produce answers. We’ve gotten almost no better at testing whether the reasoning behind those answers is sound. Stanford researchers call it AI sycophancy - the tendency of language models to tell you what you want to hear. Most users never notice. They ask, they receive, they move on. The output looks right.