Prompting lesson from long-running agents: telling it 'you may skip' makes it skip
BraceSproul · x · 2026-09-18
After weeks of heavy use of Astra on ultra-long-running agent tasks, the author found it highly sensitive to prompt wording: phrasing like "if you can't complete the query, note it as incomplete and move on" made the agent bail out frequently, even when one more attempt would succeed. Rewording to "exhaust all reasonable approaches; make your best effort without spending unnecessary tokens" keeps an escape hatch but performs far better. In long prompts with many subagents, such small tweaks are easy to miss and can silently derail the run.
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