Fail Loudly: A Tool-Schema Decision Tree for Agent Steps That Return Wrong Answers Without Failing
The bug report is always a variant of the same sentence: the agent ran, nothing threw, and the ticket got filed against the wrong customer. There is no stack trace because nothing crashed. A field defaulted to null , the tool accepted it, and the model wrote a confident summary on top. Silent failures like this burn more debugging hours than exceptions do, because an exception tells you where to…
The bug report often follows a similar pattern: the agent executes successfully, no exception is raised, and the issue is filed against the incorrect customer. There is no stack trace because nothing has crashed. A field defaults to null, the tool accepts it, and the model produces a confident summary. Silent failures like this consume more debugging time than exceptions do, as exceptions provide a clear indication of where to look.
This article presents a decision tree for this specific class of bugs, featuring six glossary terms, five branches, and a one-minute linter that you can apply to your own tool schemas.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
