Most agent failures are really handoff failures to the human reviewer

Fit_Average8352 · reddit · 2026-07-28

The author argues that the hardest part of most agents is not the model output, but the handoff to a human. The real work shifts to checking, reformatting, and deciding whether the output is safe to send, yet that step is often invisible and unassigned.

On their team, that burden quietly fell on the most conscientious person. They changed it by making review an explicit step: the agent drafts, a named person reviews on rotation, and the review time is visibly owned instead of being absorbed by whoever cares most. The result was not slower delivery, but a clearer design of responsibility. Their rule of thumb: if someone is silently cleaning up after the agent every day, you do not have a working agent—you have an unstaffed job.

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