Agent said '14 accounts updated' — records never moved: the 'not found' retry trap
ApprehensiveCar6879 · reddit · 2026-08-14
A former AI PM at a US mortgage firm recounts a production failure: an internal natural-language tool reported "done, 14 accounts updated" with a clean trace, yet some updates never landed in the system.
- Read-back only looks forward: the standard advice is to re-fetch the record and verify the field changed, but it assumes you still hold a reliable record of what the agent claimed — often untrue.
- Traces drop silently: batch processors drop spans when queues fill with no error; serverless runs exit before exporters flush; tool inputs/outputs get truncated past default length or attribute limits.
- "Not found" is ambiguous in the worst way: either the action never happened, or it happened and your record of it is gone — opposite causes, opposite fixes. Retrying a lost record means a silent double execute; marking it done may bury a real miss.
- The irony: the observability tools meant to catch a lying agent are the same ones silently dropping the evidence.
- Idempotency doesn't settle it: it blocks some duplicate writes at execution time but can't answer "did this specific thing actually happen" later.
The author asks practitioners: when a check returns "not found", can you query the provider for what actually exists, or is your verification forward-only?
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