The stubborn agent failure mode: instructions exist but retrieval never triggers
CellAgentLab · reddit · 2026-10-28
A non-engineer in Japan, after months of testing a long-term AI assistant built on ChatGPT + Google Drive, has isolated a stubborn failure mode: instructions exist and the AI follows them when explicitly asked to read them, but in ordinary conversation it starts reasoning without consulting an existing instruction that already covers the situation. A single nudge — "check the project documents first" — markedly improves output quality.
The system already has canonical documents with authority rules, context-resolution design, freshness/conflict checks, human approval, and recovery procedures; the failure happens earlier, at retrieval triggering.
He asks five questions: how to detect when retrieval is needed without relying on the LLM remembering, practical intent-based routing or dynamic instruction loading that generalizes, residual failure modes of well-designed retrieval, and whether the problem itself is misframed.
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