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)→
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