The Hardest Bug in Production Agents Isn't Hallucination — It's Silent Partial Success
Practitioners deploying autonomous agents say the failure mode that actually bites them is quieter and more dangerous than fabrication: tools that half-complete a task and report success. The fix starts with idempotency, not better prompts.
As the industry races to put agents in production, the engineers actually shipping them are converging on an unglamorous truth: the scariest failure isn't the model making things up. It's the model's tools quietly doing part of a job and reporting it as done. @selmakuno argued this weekend that "the hardest bug in production AI agents isn't hallucination — it's silent partial success," warning that if an agent's tools "aren't strictly idempotent, you have a disaster waiting."
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