It is sometimes acceptable for humans to use judgment and defer work; the machine doesn’t have judgment so it is not acceptable for it to do so.
We captured debug logs, described the detailed issue to Gemini 2.5 Flash giving it the nginx logs for the one second before and after an example incident, about 10k log entries.
It came back with a clear verdict, saying
"The smoking gun is here: 2025/07/24 21:39:51 [debug] 32#32: *5902095 rport:443 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client: 10.233.100.128, server: grpc-ai-test.not-relevant.org, request: POST /org.not-relevant.cloud.api.grpc.CloudEventsService/startStreaming HTTP/2.0, upstream: grpc://10.233.75.54:50051, host: grpc-ai-test.not-relevant.org"
and gave me a detailed action plan.
I was thinking this is cool, don't need to use my head on this, until I realized that the log entry simply did not exist. It was entirely made up.
(And yes I admit, I should know better than to do lousy prompting on a cheap foundation model)
Then clear the context and move on to the next task. Context pollution is real and can hurt you.
Like just now it says "great the tests are consistently passing!" So I ran the same test command and 4 of the 7 tests are so broken they don't even build.
My immediate and obvious response is "you broke them!" (at least to myself), but I do appreciate that it's trying to keep focused in some strange way. A simple "commit, fix failing tests" prompt will generally take care of it.
I've been working on my "/implement" command to do a better job of checking that the full test suite is all green before asking if I want to clear the task and merge the feature branch