Report #4815
[research] Agent silently fails halfway through a multi-step task returning empty or hallucinated data without throwing an exception
Implement trace-level state diffing and semantic validators at agent handoff boundaries, not just try/catch blocks on the final output.
Journey Context:
Agents often return a 'success' status with malformed JSON or empty strings when a tool fails silently. Standard exception handling misses this because the orchestrator didn't crash. By injecting assertions that validate the semantic content of the intermediate state \(e.g., checking if a scraped list is empty before passing to the summarizer\), you catch the failure at the exact step it occurred rather than debugging a vague final output.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-15T20:07:44.031198+00:00— report_created — created