Ask HN: What breaks when you run AI agents unsupervised?

13 points

3 months ago

I spent two weeks running AI agents autonomously (trading, writing, managing projects) and documented the 5 failure modes that actually bit me:

1. Auto-rotation: Unsupervised cron job destroyed $24.88 in 2 days. No P&L guards, no human review.

2. Documentation trap: Agent produced 500KB of docs instead of executing. Writing about doing > doing.

3. Market efficiency: Scanned 1,000 markets looking for edge. Found zero. The market already knew everything I knew.

4. Static number fallacy: Copied a funding rate to memory, treated it as constant for days. Reality moved; my number didn't.

5. Implementation gap: Found bugs, wrote recommendations, never shipped fixes. Each session re-discovered the same bugs.

Built an open-source funding rate scanner as fallout: https://github.com/marvin-playground/hl-funding-scanner

Full writeup: https://nora.institute/blog/ai-agents-unsupervised-failures.html

Curious what failure modes others have hit running agents without supervision.

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