What Breaks When Your AI Agent Browses the Web at Scale: 3 Months of Failures
oatmealdaddy4 · reddit · 2026-10-04
A developer shares lessons from building an autonomous research agent: IP blocks silently kill multi-step tasks (worse, the agent hallucinates missing data instead of flagging errors); rate limits cascade unpredictably, so timeout and graceful-degradation logic must be built in from day one; and treating web access as an unreliable tool with explicit fallback instructions in the system prompt was the single most effective fix. Switching to rotating residential proxies at the infrastructure layer eliminated a whole class of silent failures.
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