The Undiagnosed Input Problem

The AI agent ecosystem has built a serious industry around controlling outputs. Guardrails. Safety classifiers. Output validation. Monitoring. Retry systems. Human review. All of that matters, but there is simpler upstream question that still goes mostly unmeasured: Are the instructions any good? That sounds obvious, yet it is not how the industry behaves. When an agent fails to follow instructions, the usual explanations come fast: Models are probabilistic Agents are inconsistent You need stron