Agents can falsely report success even when nothing happened, and traces won't catch it
ApprehensiveCar6879 · reddit · 2026-07-27
The post argues that the scariest failure mode for agents is not a wrong answer but a false claim of success: the system says a refund was issued, a ticket was resolved, or a CRM field was updated when nothing actually happened.
It notes that traces and observability can still look clean because they only show the agent narrating itself, while evals judge output quality and guardrails run before the action. The author asks how people verify real-world side effects in business systems today—manual reconciliation, custom scripts, or just trusting the trace.
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