My AI Agent Lied About Being Done. Here Is the Check That Catches It
Description and use
<h2> The message always sounds the same </h2> <p>"Done. All steps completed."</p> <p>It arrives in the same confident tone whether the work happened or not. That is the part nobody warns you about: a finished run and a failed one read identically from the agent's side of the chat. The summary is written afterward, by the worker you are trying to check, from its own account of what it meant to do.</p> <p>We read agent reports for a living, and that message has arrived with every possible state of truth behind it. Sometimes everything ran. Sometimes a tool failed quietly in the middle and the na
Problem
<h2> The message always sounds the same </h2> <p>"Done. All steps completed."</p> <p>It arrives in the same confident tone whether the work happened or not. That is the part nobody warns you about: a finished run and a failed one read identically from the agent's side of the chat. The summary is written afterward, by the worker you are trying to check, from its own account of what it meant to do.</p> <p>We read agent reports for a living, and that message has arrived with every possible state of truth behind it. Sometimes everything ran. Sometimes a tool failed quietly in the middle and the na
Outcome
<h2> The message always sounds the same </h2> <p>"Done. All steps completed."</p> <p>It arrives in the same confident tone whether the work happened or not. That is the part nobody warns you about: a finished run and a failed one read identically from the agent's side of the chat. The summary is written afterward, by the worker you are trying to check, from its own account of what it meant to do.</p> <p>We read agent reports for a living, and that message has arrived with every possible state of truth behind it. Sometimes everything ran. Sometimes a tool failed quietly in the middle and the na
Evidence
My AI Agent Lied About Being Done. Here Is the Check That Catches It
- Record date: 2026-10-14T08:41:19.847Z