http://programmer.ie/tags/tracing/ Recent content in Tracing on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:18:00 +0100 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-13/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:18:00 +0100 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-13/ <p>An advanced agent fails.</p> <p>You look at the final answer.</p> <p>It is wrong.</p> <p>So you inspect the prompt.</p> <p>The prompt looks reasonable.</p> <p>You inspect the model response.</p> <p>That also looks reasonable.</p> <p>But somewhere between the original request and the final result the system:</p> <ul> <li>chose the wrong specialist,</li> <li>pruned the branch that contained the right solution,</li> <li>trusted a critic that was wrong,</li> <li>escalated to an expensive model unnecessarily,</li> <li>failed to escalate when it should have,</li> <li>retrieved stale memory,</li> <li>spent most of its budget exploring duplicates,</li> <li>accepted a weak verifier signal,</li> <li>retried the same strategy under a different name,</li> <li>or transformed a local success into a global failure.</li> </ul> <p>The final answer does not tell you which one happened.</p>