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
#
Automation
15 posts
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
Startup Ops
I Used to Handle Marketing. Now I Manage Coding Agents Too.
Coding agents have changed my working day. I still have to decide who the products are for, and I want more than my own assumptions to work with.
Sep 29, 2026
Engineering
Negotiate the Format Before You Pay the Vendor
A 3% aspect mismatch is a rounding error. A 40% one is a different video. The threshold between them decides whether you refuse before the bill or apologise after.
Sep 16, 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
AI & Automation
Stop Writing Specs for AI Agents. Write Loss Functions.
Elvis Sun's loss-function development reframes long agent loops: optimize toward a target, not a spec. We mapped it onto our content pipeline. Here's what we found.
Jun 11, 2026
AI & Automation
AI Rework Is the Hidden Cost of AI Speed
AI made first drafts cheap. It did not make finished work cheap. For many small teams, the real cost moved into review loops, cleanup, and coordination.
Apr 10, 2026