Monitoring Agents Before They Make Mistakes

stopnet54 · reddit · 2026-07-19

This post introduces a new paper on **agent tool-use interpretability**: **Beyond the Black Box: Interpretability of Agentic AI Tool Use**. The paper focuses not on *whether* a model can use tools, but on how to monitor and understand what an agent is about to do before it actually acts. The authors emphasize their attempt to use **mechanistic interpretability** to expose signals related to tool calls, including: - Which tools are planned to be called - Which calls might be missed - Which calls are actually redundant - Which actions carry higher risk The title highlights the ultimate application: catching an AI agent *before* it makes a mistake, rather than fixing it after the fact.

Original post →

More from coding & agent

coding & agent channel →