[jonmagic]

Yeah, they've got it backwards. I tried to sum it up in thisistheway.to/ai but what's been working for us is that every agent miss is a learning opportunity:

1. Capture the miss — What did the agent do? What did reality say?

2. Diagnose — What didn't it see? Missing data, constraint, feedback, or boundaries?

3. Choose a primitive — Observability, instructions, tooling, guardrails, or verification?

4. Encode as artifact — Version-controlled, repeatable, not just memory.

5. Promote to gate — When it's worth enforcing, make it a gate.

Every harness I setup includes this process in the primary set of agent instructions.