Killing Hollow Success: Engineering Agent Verifiers and Drift Detection
Federal-Teaching2800 · reddit · 2026-07-31
While developing an open-source AI agent, the author uncovered and fixed a critical evaluation flaw: when no executable verifier was configured, a tool-less 'Manager' model acted as the sole judge. This allowed a run that changed zero files to be reported as a 'success' simply by generating a convincing explanation.
Key Fixes & Upgrades
- Strict Verification: Enforced a hard rule where 'nothing verified AND nothing changed = failure'. Unmeasurable diffs are now treated as unknown. Every attempt explicitly records the approving authority (verifier, diff, manager, or none).
- Drift Detection: To combat agents circling without making progress during long runs, a new detector compares the first half of a run against the second to spot re-derived work and rising failures post-compaction. It deliberately only reports the drift without auto-intervening, as the author notes a lack of evidence for the best response strategy.
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