The Improvement Loop
Every agent miss is a learning opportunity. The goal isn't to prevent all failures—it's to build systems that learn from them.
Agents don't fail because they're lazy. They fail because they can't see. Sometimes the information isn't present. Sometimes there's no feedback loop. Sometimes we gave them too much freedom.
So the job isn't to write the perfect prompt. The job is to design an environment where the easiest path is the correct one.
The Loop
When something goes wrong, the response pattern is:
- Capture the miss — What did the agent do? What did reality say?
- Diagnose — What didn't it see? Missing data, constraint, feedback, or boundaries?
- Choose a primitive — Observability, instructions, tooling, guardrails, or verification?
- Encode as artifact — Version-controlled, repeatable, not just memory.
- Promote to gate — When it's worth enforcing, make it a gate.
Explore the Framework
- The Five Levers — What you can change
- How Agents Fail — Common failure patterns
- Tightening the Loop — When guidance becomes enforcement