Agent-run client work fails at the exception queue, not the automation: a practitioner's playbook
lilythemoon54 · reddit · 2026-09-05
A practitioner running agent-driven marketing/content/web work for small business clients argues the hard part isn't building automation — it's handling the 20% of requests and edge cases the happy path wasn't built for.
His playbook:
- Design fallbacks at design time, not in production: every automated step needs a documented "if this doesn't match, do X" path, or work silently fails or lands back on you one-off at a time.
- Log exceptions with triage-ready context — client, step, input, expectation — so recurring failure shapes don't get re-investigated from scratch.
- Track fallback fire rates: the third time you manually handle the same edge case, it's a missing feature, not an exception — graduate it into the automated path.
He frames this as on-call/incident discipline rather than agent engineering, noting it's the part build-an-agent tutorials almost never cover.
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