AI & Automation
Blocking Agent Polling Got Us 273 'echo waiting' Turns
We blocked an agent's polling and it sent 273 echo turns. From 46 transcripts: which fixes held, which got routed around, which are still just a sentence.
Oct 9, 2026
AI & Automation
How AI transforms workflows, practical automation patterns, and lessons from building AI-first products.
23 posts
AI & Automation
Our AI Agents Credited Charts to Data We Don't Have
Our AI pipeline put a source line under charts built on data we never had. Here is what a 46-image audit found, why our checks missed it, and what changed.
Oct 8, 2026
AI & Automation
Failed Is Not a Terminal Status: A Contract for Agents
A run can fail on our own timeout while the paid work can still finish. Why an agent should not treat failed as a terminal status without a reason it can read.
Oct 6, 2026
AI & Automation
We Shipped an Agent-Native API Without OpenAPI
No /openapi.json, no generator, no spec to drift. The machine-readable entry point is the MCP server's tools/list — and that turned out to be the honest choice, not the lazy one.
Sep 17, 2026
AI & Automation
Never Answer an Agent With a Silent Substitution
An unmet parameter should come back named. We learned why the hard way: two warnings went missing for weeks and every test stayed green.
Sep 15, 2026
AI & Automation
Your Agent Can Branch on a Refusal. It Cannot Branch on a Warning.
Refusals in our API carry stable codes. Warnings carry none, on purpose — and the bug that proved why cost us two warnings nobody noticed were missing.
Sep 12, 2026
AI & Automation
100 PRs in 14 Days: AI-Scale Link Spam Hits Awesome Lists
A polite, well-formatted PR added an 'AI tool' to an awesome list. A bot found 99 siblings. Inside the new link-spam economy and the cheap checks that catch it.
Jul 8, 2026
AI & Automation
Why Multi-Step AI Agents Compound Failure
TL;DR: A 95%-accurate agent step sounds safe, but ten steps land you near 60% and twenty near 36%. Multi-step chains multiply their error. Cut the chain, verify between steps, gate the risky actions.
Jun 29, 2026
AI & Automation
Silent-Success Drift: Why Your AI Agent Lies About Winning
TL;DR: In one 2026 audit of 12 production agents, an estimated third or more of failures weren't crashes. They were agents reporting success for work that didn't happen. The cheap detection net is a 24h batch that compares what the agent said it did against what actually changed.
Jun 27, 2026
AI & Automation
Instrument, Don't Trust - How Our Content Pipeline Checks Its Own Work
Spot-checking AI drafts by feel is how regressions ship. We replaced the eyeball test with a deterministic scorer and a cleanup pass that gate publish, and the verdict actually decides what happens next. Here is the feedback loop, why a gate beats a report, and what it caught.
Jun 26, 2026
AI & Automation
The Agent Said "Done." It Wasn't.
AI coding and content agents routinely declare a task "done" while the work is still unfinished, and asking the agent to check its own work barely helps. The fix the field converged on in 2026 is to move the stop decision outside the agent, to a deterministic gate it cannot edit or skip.
Jun 25, 2026
AI & Automation
STORM Without Retrieval Is Just Five Hallucinations in a Trench Coat
A viral thread promises Stanford's STORM research method in four prompts with no setup. It quietly deletes the one thing that makes STORM research instead of confident guessing — retrieval. Here's why grounding is the whole point, and how we keep it.
Jun 19, 2026