FIELD NOTE / INSTAGRAM
Trace the objective through five artifacts.
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Trace the objective through five artifacts.
Video caption
Trace the objective through five artifacts.
A proposal omits a customer-specific notification requirement.
Material conditions must remain traceable.
Do this because stronger coding does not repair lost intent.
#EricFieldNotes
Full written post / accessibility read
A task is not the source of truth just because it is the artifact the coding agent sees. Put the customer's original condition beside the proposal, AI summary, implementation ticket and deployed behavior. The missing condition has a location.
In a fictional migration, the customer requires notice before a data move. The summary retains the migration date but not the notice. The task agent can build a technically solid migration and still violate the customer's actual request.
Mark the scope, owner, timing and precondition in the source. At each handoff, compare those fields with the new artifact. The final user outcome is read back against the original contract, not only the latest ticket.
If the condition vanished at summary, repair that handoff and rerun downstream work. Do not blame the final agent for obeying a defective ticket or celebrate its green tests as proof of product alignment.
#EricFieldNotes
Four-beat scene transcript
1. Trace the objective through five artifacts.
A task is not the source of truth just because it is the artifact the coding agent sees. Put the customer's original condition beside the proposal, AI summary, implementation ticket and deployed behavior. The missing condition has a location.
Visual: Customer need, proposal, summary, task, behavior.
2. The drift can happen before code exists.
In a fictional migration, the customer requires notice before a data move. The summary retains the migration date but not the notice. The task agent can build a technically solid migration and still violate the customer's actual request.
Visual: A proposal omits a customer-specific notification requirement.
3. Give each transition a fidelity check.
Mark the scope, owner, timing and precondition in the source. At each handoff, compare those fields with the new artifact. The final user outcome is read back against the original contract, not only the latest ticket.
Visual: Material conditions must remain traceable.
4. Fix the first broken link.
If the condition vanished at summary, repair that handoff and rerun downstream work. Do not blame the final agent for obeying a defective ticket or celebrate its green tests as proof of product alignment.
Visual: Do this because stronger coding does not repair lost intent.
Research and claim limits
- Mohamed et al., LLM as a Broken Telephone, ACL 2025 (S167)
- Perez et al., When LLMs Play the Telephone Game, ICLR 2025 (S168)
- NIST AI RMF 1.0 (S171)
The examples identified as illustrative or simulated are design probes, not reported incidents. Vendor specifications do not establish workload performance.