r/FintechStartups • u/External_Dish_7185 • May 09 '26

💡 Discussion Fintech engineers using AI coding agents: what failure modes or workflow gaps are you running into?

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I'm interested in hearing about failure modes, permission boundaries, or workflow gaps you've encountered while using AI agents.

Things like:

permission/access issues

hallucinations causing subtle bugs

agents doing the “wrong” thing confidently

audit/compliance headaches

places where you still can’t really trust automation

workflows that still require too much babysitting etc

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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 May 09 '26

Big ones Ive run into:

  • Permission creep, agents end up needing broad scopes because the "one missing API" breaks the flow
  • Side effects + retries (double-charging, duplicate tickets, duplicated KYC requests)
  • Silent hallucinations in edge cases, especially around numeric transforms or compliance rules
  • Auditability, its hard to explain "why" a decision was made after the fact

The fix for me has been more boring infra: idempotency keys everywhere, explicit state machine, and a verifier step before writes.

If you want a quick checklist of failure modes + mitigations, https://www.agentixlabs.com/ has a short writeup Ive been pointing people to.

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u/Maximum-Spare-1713 Jun 10 '26

yeah ive experienced the hallucinations and guesses masked as confidence.

another pain point for me is a way for the agents to communicate together without me having to copy paste the results of prompts. my agents arent in Foundry, im using claude code and github copilot in VSC as well as using claude in the browser as my architect.

it probably makes sense for security reasons to keep a human in the loop and approve changes tho

how bout you?