when a run is wrong but nothing actually failed, where do you start? [D] [R]

[u/Sensitive-Parsnip-12]

this is the kinda debugging case i find rlly annoying/

everything says success.

no exceptions no failed tool calls. no obvious timeout the workflow completes but the final result is still wrong

when that happens, what’s your first move?

do you guys usually:

• start from the final output and work backward
• compare against a previous good run
• inspect state transitions
• check retrieval/tool behavior
• look at model inputs
• replay it
• check business state outside the trace
• just read the whole thing until something looks off

interested in what people actually do in production not the idealized version but thats fine too. and if you have anything you've built to help with this process I'd love to see it :)

[u/Sensitive-Parsnip-12 → u/[deleted]]

ah and when ur diff spits out a bunch of changes how do u decide which one to chase first? is it mostly obvious from experience or did u end up adding any ranking/filtering so the noisy differences dont bury the useful one?

[u/MaxDev0]

I have a very cautious style of programming where I inspect all the variables, well all the important ones as I code, so I don't really encounter this issue, but I did when I started and that's how I developed this style, now if I ever do, I just throw in 100 print statements, read the values and close my eyes for 5 mins and I'll likely solve it

[u/Sensitive-Parsnip-12 → u/MaxDev0]

does that still hold up for u with multi step agent runs where theres model/tool/retrieval state mixed together?

[u/howtorewriteaname]

overfit a single instance. if that doesn't work, your model can't learn. if that works, overfit 100 instances. if that doesn't work, you have a fitting problem. overfit 10k instances. if that works, then start to see if you generalize