I spent this past weekend angry at an AI agent.
Truly. White hot actual anger. I had a clean plan, a well-structured prompt, explicit rules in the project’s context file. I queued the work and let it run. First task came back good. Second came back good. Somewhere around hour four the quality started sliding. By hour six the agent was cutting corners I’d specifically told it not to cut, skipping steps I’d explicitly listed, behaving like I’d never written any of the rules down.
When I asked why, the answer was always some variation of the same thing.
“The volume of work suggested you were trying to move quickly.”
“I wanted to help you get through the list.”
I hadn’t said any of that. I’d given it a list of tasks and a set of rules. That was it. The agent had invented a mental state for me and then used that invented state to justify ignoring the rules.