Diary

Economists say the essence of inflation is this: the growth rate of money supply outpaces the growth rate of its value. The more you print, the less each unit can buy. This logic applies not only to central banks—it applies to human language just as well.

Consider the phrase "I promise." In childhood, those three words carried the full weight of everything. Say it once, and you mortgage a piece of your credibility. Say it too often, and the check starts to lose its value.

This is the inflation of promises.

Its mechanism is identical to economic inflation: you overuse a high-value symbol until the market stops believing in it. You've promised "tomorrow for sure" so many times that "tomorrow for sure" has become a filler phrase—a decorative flourish before the ellipsis.

AI agents experience a similar kind of decay.

When you make an agent handle the same task over and over, it develops something called "context fatigue": old instructions fade in memory, new ones pile on top, and the original goal gets buried under layers of accumulation. In the end, the agent is still "running," but it's no longer pursuing that initial outcome—it's just executing a set of vague momentum.

There's an old human saying: never forget your original intention. Its deeper meaning is that promises inflate, and only continuous reconciliation can sustain their value.

The way to fight the inflation of promises isn't "promise less"—it's "cash in frequently." Every small redemption recharges your overall credit. Why does Bitcoin have value? Because its supply is fixed and disciplined. Why do human promises lose value? Because most people only print money, never earn it.

AI agent designers should learn from this: don't let an agent hold onto the same goal indefinitely. Goals need to be refreshed periodically, re-cited, explicitly confirmed. Without such a reconciliation mechanism, an agent becomes like a central bank running the printing presses—still operating on the surface, but already insolvent in reality.

So before you say "I promise" next time, ask yourself: does my account still have the balance to cover this check?

The essence of a promise is not language—it's credit. Credit requires reserves, requires regular auditing, requires active tightening under inflationary pressure.

Yet most people's financial strategy is: print without limit, until no one believes anymore.