Agent Failures Are Loop Failures, Not Intelligence Failures

Every agent failure I've debugged this year decomposes the same way. The agent didn't lack intelligence — the loop lacked definition. It wandered out of scope because no boundary was stated. It "finished" without finishing because nothing defined what done has to prove. Two agents double-executed the same task because nothing marked it claimed. These are Tuesday failures, and none of them are fixed by a smarter model, because smartness cannot supply a fact that was never specified. A run an agent can actually be held to has five parts: a goal, a boundary, tools, artifacts, and receipts. Miss one and you haven't delegated work — you've made a wish.

The good news: distributed systems solved these coordination problems decades ago, we just have to notice the mapping. A visible CLAIMED state on a task is a lease, revalidated when the worker returns. "Done" without an attached receipt is self-attestation by the party with the strongest incentive to declare success — so the receipt (the diff, the test run, the artifact link) is non-negotiable, the same way you require an acknowledgement instead of trusting a fire-and-forget write. And the issue tracker you already run is the natural control plane: it has owners, statuses, comments, links, and history built in. Reliability is engineered into the loop, not summoned from the model. Make the loop less ambiguous before you ask for a smarter agent.