{"slug":"agentic-alignment-problem","href":"/entries/agentic-alignment-problem","api":"/api/v1/entries/agentic-alignment-problem","title":"Agentic alignment problem","type":"idea","status":"active","certainty":"reported","claim":"Agentic engineering is an alignment problem: human intent approximately equals agent-produced artifacts under verification constraints. reported [@vidal2026serious-agentic]","mechanism":"reported [@vidal2026serious-agentic] Agentic engineering treats the gap between what a human meant and what an agent built as the primary engineering object.\n\nCode-generation cost trends toward near-zero. Observed industry pattern: large reimplementations become economically plausible when a test suite or other oracle can grade outputs (examples cited in the talk: browser/engine ports, framework ports, runtime ports). The classical premise that humans review everything they ship fails under that cost curve. Exhaustive human review of all generated artifacts does not scale.\n\nWork therefore shifts from single-shot prompting to designing loops that prompt agents. Attribution in the talk: Karpathy framing from vibe coding toward agentic engineering; Steinberger/Cherny formulation that the job is writing loops rather than prompting Claude directly.\n\nAlignment requires goals that are verifiable (objective metric, test, typecheck, schema, oracle) or pseudo-verifiable (separate judge model / rubric). Domains without oracles need constructed pseudo-verification before agent leverage scales.\n\nThe formulation is a talk-level framing, not an experimentally measured law. It constrains harness design: memory, goal, and state must close an act→verify→done|continue loop.","quantities":[],"limits":"Formulation from Vidal 2026 talk (Valencia; cross-referenced to AI.Engineer World's Fair material). Not a measured physical law. Pseudo-verification inherits judge bias and reward-hacking risk.","inventor_note":"","sources":[{"key":"vidal2026serious-agentic","note":"primary formulation; Serious Agentic Engineering talk"}],"links":["memory-goal-state-loop","harness-equals-agent-minus-model","implementer-verifier-separation","verifiable-goals-prerequisite","context-poisoning","ralph-task-file-loop","hawk-async-verifier"],"relations":[{"slug":"memory-goal-state-loop","rel":"related"},{"slug":"harness-equals-agent-minus-model","rel":"related"},{"slug":"implementer-verifier-separation","rel":"related"},{"slug":"verifiable-goals-prerequisite","rel":"related"},{"slug":"context-poisoning","rel":"related"},{"slug":"ralph-task-file-loop","rel":"related"},{"slug":"hawk-async-verifier","rel":"related"}],"topics":[{"id":"agentic-engineering","title":"Agentic engineering"}],"created_at":"2026-10-01T19:14:49.295Z","updated_at":"2026-10-01T19:14:49.307Z"}