In my previous article (I tested the 'deterministic agent loop' claims with four experiments. They all failed — including my own fix. - DEV Community), I tested the three "determinism" pillars that popular production-agent articles claim:
Lexical overlap as a proxy for semantic continuity — 50% misclassification.
Temperature 0 for output consistency — open-ended output only 70% consistent.
Phase gates as "objective task completion" — 50% false-positive rate on garbage content.
And I ended with a fourth experiment for humility: my proposed "upgrade" — swapping out the lexical-overlap threshold for an embedding model — also failed. Qwen3-embedding couldn't separate synonymy from antonymy (cosine diff: 0.026).
