Reddit thread distills agent debugging: reliability comes from the system, not better prompts
Ai_moneyhustler · reddit · 2026-09-16
After posting about the misery of debugging AI agents, the author found the comment section offered more signal than the original post:
- Log and replay tool calls: log every tool call's inputs/outputs and replay the exact failed call instead of rerunning the whole flow — most phantom failures die once you see the one call where arguments went sideways.
- Structured output validator: to fix silent day-to-day output drift, put a schema validator between the LLM and the tool layer, forcing retries until output matches — config drift replaced ghost bugs.
- The core reframe: reliability must come from the system around the model, not a better prompt. Break behavior into small testable steps with hard rules: a failed tool call must never count as success, unknown stays unknown, stale context must not overwrite current state.
The post is just bait for value — the people who have actually shipped reliable agents are in the comments.
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