What actually broke when I gave my agent full autonomy for a week
ladyshrekk · reddit · 2026-10-04
Running an agent with minimal human checkpoints on a research/summarization workflow for a week surfaced three failure modes: infinite tool-call retry loops (fixed largely by residential rotating proxies to avoid IP-block dead ends), memory poisoning (early bad outputs stored and confidently cited later), and scope creep into irrelevant subtasks. The fix that worked wasn't better prompting but explicit confidence thresholds—forcing the agent to flag uncertainty before acting.
More from coding & agent
- After 1,000+ kernel CVEs and a kvm escape, more sympathy for sandboxing AI agents — matthew_d_green · 2026-10-04
- OpenRouter cofounder: 10 specialized agents beat one universal chief of staff — hwchase17 · 2026-10-04
- MCP server mcp-azure lets AI manage Azure DevOps work items, sprints and WIQL queries — modelcontextprotocol · 2026-10-04
- Artist launches first artist-owned MCP server to stream his album via AI clients — modelcontextprotocol · 2026-10-04
- uv fork runs dev sessions ~33% faster with 40-60% less disk, author still unsure it's enough — mitsuhiko · 2026-10-04
- cmdshellmcp: an allowlisted shell MCP server with Docker sandbox for AI agents — ag789 · 2026-10-04