How expensive are silent agent failures, really? Reddit weighs debugging costs
Sensitive-Parsnip-12 · reddit · 2026-09-27
A Redditor wants to separate "annoying" agent bugs from ones that genuinely cost time — specifically silent failures where a run completes but the output is wrong and someone has to investigate.
They sketch a cost spectrum (5 min → 30 min → hours → multiple engineers for half a day) and list what makes a bug expensive: customer impact, blocked deploys, multiple engineers pulled in, poor reproducibility, bad data written, and nobody knowing which part of the run mattered. The core question: where's the line where teams change their whole workflow?
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