My reasoning is that if something is argumentatively incorrect, it is much easier to drill down to its misunderstanding and correct it. On the other hand, if it's sycophantically incorrect, it'll just change its "mind" while potentially maintaining the misunderstanding, leading to increasingly strange behavior.

I think I'm pretty used to my tools making me want to throw them out the window sometimes :) Even before AI that was a common occurrence from either a lack of knowledge on my end, or many software people having no regard for their users' time.

I'm sure tools don't like annoying people either.

you think LLMs or agent harnesses have intention?

I agree, tools designed to be fawning sycophantics are annoying.