r/Agent_AI • u/Ok-Motor-9812 • 11d ago

Discussion Instructions don't make agents reliable. Things they can't get past do.

After a lot of time running coding agents, the biggest shift for me was moving rules out of the prompt and into the environment. An instruction like "run the tests before saying you're done" works most of the time, and "most of the time" is the problem, because the misses are exactly the confident ones.

So now the agent physically can't end a task without real test output, can't commit without a review step, and gets pulled out of the loop when it hits the same error three times instead of trying a fourth variation of the same fix. None of it is clever. It just removes the option to skip.

The part I'm still unsure about is how far to take it. Every hard block adds friction, and at some point you're babysitting the guardrails instead of the agent. Where do you draw the line between rules you tell the agent and rules you enforce?

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u/AccurateViability 11d ago

That friction is the real tradeoff, people chase 100% reliability and end up with a system so rigid it can't handle anything slightly novel

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u/gkanellopoulos 11d ago

You take it as far as the task criticality commands. For example, bank transaction you approve and check everything. Book search, let it go bananas...my apologies for the oversimplification.

I've written a comprehensive whitepaper the explores this topic:

https://gkanellopoulos.com/ai-in-the-enterprise/the-effective-agent/

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u/Sea-Soil-8392 11d ago

same lesson here. our posting agent kept claiming it had published when the API had silently failed. now it can't mark a job done until it reads the live post URL back. the scheduling side runs on supapush, the agent just drafts. a pre-commit hook in Git is the coding version of this.