Verifier Agents and Placebo Tests: Catching an AI Causal Analysis That Reasons Itself Wrong
hugobowne · x · 2026-10-06
Hugo Bowne-Anderson shares Thomas Wiecki's teaching workflow: an agent found the right causal result then reasoned itself out of it with a convincing false explanation. Wiecki added a fresh verifier agent, ran placebo tests to expose the mistake, distilled the failure into a reusable skill, and recovered the correct result. He also has Codex and Claude Code critique each other's independent analyses.
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