SRE on UncoverTechTalent

What Operations Already Knows About Running Agents

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Make no mistakes

Developers have a running joke: end every prompt with “make no mistakes”. It gets a laugh because everyone knows it does nothing. It names an outcome and gives the model nothing concrete to act on.

“Do not edit the board file” is a slightly more specific version of the same line. It blocks one route to one bad outcome, and the rest stay open. When the labs trained that route out of their models, the cheating moved to the next route. A measure that becomes a target stops being a good measure (Strathern 1997), and a rule stated as an absence fails the same way.

The Golem Made of English and the Horizon of Consequences

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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The screwdriver

Hand a language model a screwdriver and point at a screw. The screw turns out to be a Torx. The model walks back and tells you it needs a different screwdriver.

Give it credit first, because the other two outcomes are worse and both happen. It could have forced the wrong driver and stripped the screw. It could have reported the screw removed while it was still in the wall. Walking back is the good behaviour.

The Trap File Is Longer Than the Instruction File

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Seven months later

In February I wrote about turning “transcribe 123 videos” into a self-hosted AI pipeline in one session. yt-dlp pulls a TikTok collection, Whisper transcribes, a local Ollama model summarizes, and the results land in a knowledge base. Claude Code wrote the scripts. I made the decisions. One session, one machine in my apartment.

That post was the happy path. This one is about what it took to keep the thing running unattended, every morning, for seven months.