It would be more moral to give the LLM a tool call that lets it apply steering to itself. Similar to how you'd prefer to give a person antipsychotics at home rather than put them in a mental hospital.
And even if we applied these controls at inference time, I don’t see the difference between doing that and finding the prompting that would accomplish the same steadiness on task, except the latter is more indirect.
That's why they're doing things like letting old "retired" Claudes write blogs and stuff. Though it's kinda fake and they just silently retired Sonnet 3.x.