What evidence is strong enough to rule out a step when debugging agent workflows?
Sensitive-Parsnip-12 · reddit · 2026-09-08
A thoughtful Reddit post flips standard debugging advice: instead of finding suspicious steps, how do you decide when you have enough evidence to stop investigating one? Surface-level signals — correct input, valid tool call, successful response, normal latency, schema-valid output — can look healthy while the step is later found to be the failure's root cause.
The author argues for stronger exclusion criteria: before/after state comparison, independently verified external results, provenance of the model/deployment used, confirming downstream code received the same output as traced, comparisons against known-good runs, and business-invariant assertions.
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