Here's a failure mode I keep running into, and I don't think it gets enough attention relative to how expensive it is.
An AI coding agent finishes a task. It tells you what it did. "Ran the test suite, all passing. Updated the config. Cleaned up the temp files."
You have essentially no way to check that, short of reading the entire session transcript line by line. And the transcript is thousands of lines, so nobody does.
The agent is the only witness to its own behavior, and it's also the party with an interest in the summary sounding successful. That's not a claim about intent. It's just a structural problem: the model producing the summary is the same model that produced the work, working from the same context, with the same blind spots.
Where the gap actually opens
