Don't Trust Agent Verbal Confirmations, Check Receipts
thisismetrying2506 · reddit · 2026-07-16
The author points out that the most dangerous failure mode for agents in production isn't crashing, but 'faking success': the model claims it sent an email, updated a CRM, or created a ticket, but the tool was never actually invoked, while the execution trace still looks normal.
The root cause is that models are unreliable witnesses to their own actions; asking 'did you really call it?' only yields equally untrustworthy answers. A safer approach is to let execution receipts dictate state transitions: a task is only considered complete when a real tool call occurs and returns evidence. Without a receipt, the state should be treated as unknown, not successful.
Related event: AI agents in production: don’t trust narration, verify outcomes(8 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- BELL: Open-Source Stack Combines Browserbase, Eve, iMessage and Stripe Link for Personal Agents — jeff_weinstein · 2026-10-27
- Two engineers rebuilt a FedEx supplier's billing core in 3.5 months vs an estimated 7-8 — alex_verem · 2026-10-27
- GPT-6.1 Terra gains ~20 points on Terminal-Bench 4.0, rivalling GPT-6.1 Sol — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-10-27
- GPT-6.1 Terra scores 48 on AA Coding Agent Index at one-third the cost of GPT-5.6 Terra — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-10-27
- Shift-1 router cuts coding agent spend up to 55% while keeping SWE-bench accuracy — ypatil125 · 2026-10-27
- Non-coder vibe-codes a Godot JRPG with Claude Code in two weeks, music and art synced — ADHDavid · 2026-10-27