We were debugging a pretty complex automation pipeline and kept blaming the model for inconsistent behavior.
Turns out… the model wasn’t the problem.
The actual failure points were architectural:
- Tasks weren’t specific enough -> different agents interpreted them differently.
- No validation step in the middle -> one wrong assumption poisoned the rest of the pipeline.
- External tool calls had zero retries -> small outages caused giant failures.
- A subtle circular dependency made two steps wait on each other indefinitely.
What surprised me was how early these issues happened, the system was failing before the “real” work even began.
Made me rethink how much structure matters before you add any intelligence on top.
Curious if anyone else has run into workflow-level failures that looked like model bugs at first.
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