The reliable fix for agent hallucinated enum values is a tool boundary, not a stronger prompt
Loud-Tax6854 · reddit · 2026-07-26
- A frontend engineer describes a real bug in an AI content-generation agent: it sometimes invented enum values like inreviewpending even though only inreview existed.
- The fix was not a stricter prompt.
- Instead, the allowed values were moved into a tool that returns the current enum, and the agent’s output is validated against that list before acceptance.
- The key lesson: the prompt is a suggestion; the tool boundary is the contract.
- The author asks for similar patterns for fuzzier constraints, such as component prop names.
More from coding & agent
- charlie Marsh: rewrites beat external deps in the AI era — mohamedmansour · 2026-10-26
- OpenAI and Twitch launch Codex hackathon with $25,000 in prizes — OpenAIDevs · 2026-10-26
- Filtering secrets on the write path: why agent memory deserves more suspicion at ingest than retrieval — Classic-Being-7960 · 2026-10-26
- INT21's AI agent swarm rewrote Drama 3's inference runtime in Rust within one hour, beating SGLang-Omni — bingxu_ · 2026-10-26
- After OpenCode key leak: 5 practical rules for keeping keys away from agents — jacobholm_dev · 2026-10-26
- wandb 0.31.0 ships with 2x faster startup, adds JSON output for coding agents — wandb · 2026-10-26