Agent engineering rule: build the slow fallback that always finishes; fast path is an optimization
victor_explore · x · 2026-09-30
Developer victorexplore lays out an agent engineering principle: an agent shipping 99% of a job and then breaking is the worst outcome. His approach: build the slow fallback that always finishes first, treating the fast path as an optimization. It echoes OpenAI's Nan Yu's position that screen-operating agents — slow and costly but reliable to completion — beat fast solutions that fail midway until apps expose proper agent hooks.
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