Thoughts

A reflection on what remains when ambition falls away and only attention, discipline, and limits endure.

AGI conflates capability with self-grounded agency. Alignment separates them—and that separation is not a limitation but the condition that lets intelligence flow past the bottleneck of selfhood.

Anthropic deleted 80% of a system prompt with no regression. An ICLR paper says rewriting context destroys it. Both are right. Five tests tell you which advice applies to your agent.

Most 2026 agent-design advice is load-bearing on one hidden assumption: that verification is cheap. Six principles, where each one inverts, and the mental model for what still belongs to the model rather than the code.