Precise About What?

I have been watching systems report success while being wrong about something that matters since I was a teenager with root access on machines I probably shouldn't have had root access on. A health check returning 200 OK from a process that stopped doing useful work ten minutes ago. A deploy that passes every check and quietly degrades p99 latency for one customer segment. The system confirmed something real. The confirmation was specific enough that nobody looked further.

This is not a new failure mode. But agent outputs have made it significantly worse, because the outputs are more specific than anything we used to get from automated systems. I've started calling it a precision alibi. The output's detail gives you a reason not to investigate. It's the artifact you'd point to if someone asked "did you verify that?" Yes, look: structured data, clean formatting, real numbers. The specificity is not evidence of correctness. It's an alibi for not checking.

A colleague showed me one last month. A text-to-SQL tool had answered a question about monthly active users. Clean table. Dates and counts. Numbers trending in a plausible direction. The tool had resolved the question to a column name, joined tables, executed a query against a real schema, and returned real numbers. Every one of those steps actually happened. But whether "monthly active users" meant what her team meant by that phrase, which events counted, which user types were excluded, what the activity window was, none of that was anywhere in the output. In some frameworks, the generated SQL isn't even shown to non-admin users by default. You get the polished answer. Decimal places and all.

Decimal places are incredibly convincing when you're not already looking for reasons to distrust them.

Here's the thing I want you to notice about your own attention. When an output comes back clean and specific, what you feel is relief. Good, that worked, move on. That relief is the tell. That is the exact moment the precision alibi does its job. The absence of anything visibly broken becomes, in your head, the presence of verification.

It isn't verification. It was never verification.

The same gap shows up everywhere agents act on your behalf. When an MCP tool call succeeds, the response gives you a content payload and an isError flag. That's it. The schema defines no standard fields for credential owner, credential scope, revocation path, or approval record. So "authenticated" and "governed" are two completely different claims, but the output makes them feel like the same claim. A successful call looks like a governed integration because the response is detailed enough to stop you from asking whether anyone actually authorized it, knows how to shut it off, or could tell you who owns the credential if something goes sideways at 2 AM. The tool's own annotations are, per the spec, "not guaranteed to faithfully describe behavior." The protocol standardizes discovery and invocation. It does not standardize mandate or approval. Those are different things. Nobody treats them like different things.

Browser automation is the same story. Playwright's actionability checks confirm that an element is visible, stable, enabled, and receives events before clicking. The click itself returns void. Success is literally nothing. The framework verified geometry and event delivery. Whether that click was a legitimate delegated act, whether the agent should have performed it, whether the downstream system recognizes it as authorized: silence. Total silence. You get back void and your brain fills in "worked."

Three domains, one pattern. The system proves something narrow and real. The output's specificity makes it feel like proof of something broader. And the gap between those two is where meaning failures live. They're hard to catch precisely because nothing looks broken. I have spent my entire career fighting this exact class of problem in production systems, and I'm telling you: the version of it that agents produce is harder to see, not easier, because the outputs are so much more polished than the janky log lines and status codes we used to squint at.

The habit I'm asking you to build is small. When an agent output comes back looking clean and confident, when you feel that little wash of relief, pause. Ask: precise about what? Not what the output implies. What the system actually checked.

The outputs are going to keep getting more polished. The alibi gets better every year. Your instinct to interrogate it has to keep up, or you're going to spend a lot of time trusting answers that were precise about exactly the wrong thing.