"How often can a hallucination become a real action?" Reddit debates production agent safety
Informal-Dust4499 · reddit · 2026-09-29
A Reddit discussion on how hallucinations change once chatbots gain tools and permissions: a model that misremembers a refund policy can actually call the refund API, and better prompting alone isn't a safety mechanism.
The author's core proposal: separate what the model is allowed to reason about from what it may decide or execute. Instead of trusting the model's answer to "is this customer eligible?", have the agent retrieve order dates, policy, account status and refund history, then validate eligibility independently before the refund tool is even available. Guiding principle: don't let the model guess things your systems already know.
The thread also surveys common production safeguards for debate: RAG + prompting, separate validation of tool calls, deterministic rules around sensitive actions, a second model verifying the first, and human approval above thresholds. The author argues the more useful metric for agents isn't hallucination rate but "how often can a hallucination turn into a real-world action?"
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