← All IntelClip / AI AgentsThe vicious loop: an agent constrained by the data it analyzes
From How we solved Context Management in Agents — Sally-Ann Delucia · ≈4:07
A clean postmortem of a self-reinforcing failure — an observability agent running on its own trace data kept retrying, adding more spans, and failing again.
What’s in it
- A clean postmortem of a self-reinforcing failure — an observability agent running on its own trace data kept retrying, adding more spans, and failing again.
Clip transcript
just an engineering one. And this is the vicious loop that we got stuck in. So when we were building Alex, basically what we decided to do is like if we can build an agent that makes our lives easier in building our application, we'll know we'll have something that our users really want to use. And so we built Alex using Alex. And this is the vicious loop that we kept getting stuck in, where Alex would run on our our traces span data. The spans would grow, there would be too much data, we'd hit a context limit, Alex would fail. And the span has that data, so it would try again, we'd add more data to it, it would run, and then it would fail. So we kept getting stuck in this loop where our context was growing and growing. We couldn't get Alex to actually perform on it. And so we knew that we needed to come up with some kind of strategy. So the system analyzing the data was constrained by the data, and that was a major problem for us. Alex was never going to be able to succeed unless it could understand and taken all of this data. So how did we solve that? Well, it's kind of a three-part thing, three things that we really learned here to
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