Hey everyone, it's me, your friendly neighborhood senior dev. I've been running some AI agents for my side hustle during weeknights, and recently had a heart-stopping moment I wanted to log and share.
My market analysis agent, which takes several hours to complete, sent a Slack notification that its task was done. "Great!" I thought, and opened the final report file it generated. To my horror, the content was truncated midway. The file size was also suspiciously small.
My blood ran cold for a second. This task involves a fair number of LLM API calls and a long execution time. Honestly, rerunning it was out of the question, both in terms of time and cost.
Cause Unknown, But "Writes Can Fail" Is a Reality
First, I tried to figure out why the file was corrupted. Looking at the agent's execution logs, the process exited with a normal 0 status code. No exceptions were thrown.
