The hardest agent bugs are the ones where the output looks correct

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

A practitioner reflects on the hardest AI agent bugs: failures that produce confident, well-formatted but subtly wrong output, and shares mitigation tactics like output assertion checks, independent math verification, and source citation.

A crashing agent is easy, you see the error and fix it. The ones that quietly ruined my week returned confident, well-formatted output that was subtly wrong. A date off by one, a total that did not include tax, a summary that dropped the one caveat that mattered. These pass every smoke test because they look right. I now add assertion checks on the output itself, not just did it run. For anything numeric I have a second cheap pass verify the math independently. For anything factual I make it cite the source row. The almost-right-but-not-quite failure is the real tax on agents and no model upgrade has made it go away for me.
Original Article

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