We thought our GPT-5.4 agent got lazier in production — it was a 3-bug workflow teaching it to quit

Description and use

<h1> We thought our GPT-5.4 agent got lazier in production — it was a 3-bug workflow teaching it to quit </h1> <p>We had an n8n agent that looked great in staging.</p> <p>It would:</p> <ul> <li>search</li> <li>pull docs</li> <li>compare sources</li> <li>verify claims</li> <li>write a grounded answer</li> </ul> <p>Then we shipped it.</p> <p>In production, the same task started ending after one shallow pass.</p> <p>Symptoms were exactly what people usually call “model laziness”:</p> <ul> <li>shorter outputs</li> <li>fewer tool calls</li> <li>more confident wrong answers</li> <li>less evidence of

Problem

<h1> We thought our GPT-5.4 agent got lazier in production — it was a 3-bug workflow teaching it to quit </h1> <p>We had an n8n agent that looked great in staging.</p> <p>It would:</p> <ul> <li>search</li> <li>pull docs</li> <li>compare sources</li> <li>verify claims</li> <li>write a grounded answer</li> </ul> <p>Then we shipped it.</p> <p>In production, the same task started ending after one shallow pass.</p> <p>Symptoms were exactly what people usually call “model laziness”:</p> <ul> <li>shorter outputs</li> <li>fewer tool calls</li> <li>more confident wrong answers</li> <li>less evidence of

Outcome

<h1> We thought our GPT-5.4 agent got lazier in production — it was a 3-bug workflow teaching it to quit </h1> <p>We had an n8n agent that looked great in staging.</p> <p>It would:</p> <ul> <li>search</li> <li>pull docs</li> <li>compare sources</li> <li>verify claims</li> <li>write a grounded answer</li> </ul> <p>Then we shipped it.</p> <p>In production, the same task started ending after one shallow pass.</p> <p>Symptoms were exactly what people usually call “model laziness”:</p> <ul> <li>shorter outputs</li> <li>fewer tool calls</li> <li>more confident wrong answers</li> <li>less evidence of

Evidence

We thought our GPT-5.4 agent got lazier in production — it was a 3-bug workflow teaching it to quit

Source