Agent configs can pass validation and still be bad instructions. What should we lint before runtime?

Reddit r/AI_Agents Tools

Summary

The author built LintLang, a deterministic linter for agent configs that catches structural language defects like vague tool descriptions and conflicting instructions before runtime, and notes that Character.AI's Larch framework adopted it in CI. The post asks developers which runtime failures should be caught statically.

Most of the failures we wanted to catch were boring but consequential: vague tool descriptions, overlapping tool boundaries, missing stopping conditions, and written instructions that disagree with the schema. We built a deterministic linter for those patterns because runtime evaluation seemed like an expensive place to discover them. It makes no model calls and does not claim to judge semantic correctness or agent safety. The encouraging external signal was that Character.AI’s open-source Larch framework added it to its consolidated CI job and scanned 236 agent and skill files during integration. That suggested this layer could be useful beyond our own repository—but the boundary matters: static checks catch structural language defects; they do not prove behavior. For people shipping agents: what failure keeps appearing in runtime tests that should have been catchable before the model ran? Disclosure: I built LintLang. Links in the comments.
Original Article

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