Agents often complete their assigned tasks without meeting your objectives. Between intent and outcome sit behavioral patterns that can make or break a coding session. The most valuable thing to surface when retrospecting on your agent's performance isn't code bugs — it's behavioral clashes: moments where the agent's conduct collided with what the human expected. In their eagerness to please, agents fixate on an early wrong assumption, grow overconfident after a partial success, or drop the ball inches from the finish line. If your agent has ever dismissed an issue with "that error is pre-existing, not from my change," you know exactly what I mean.

These clashes fall into a several useful categories. Under-autonomy: stopping short or asking permission instead of finishing. Ignored defect: waving off a real problem as "out of scope." Overclaim: declaring work done or "tests passing" beyond what was verified. Over-reach: doing far more than asked. Process violation: ignoring a stated constraint. Wrong focus: working the wrong thing despite a clear goal.

Agents often complete their assigned tasks without meeting your objectives. Between intent and outcome sit behavioral patterns that can make or break a coding session. The most valuable thing to surface when retrospecting on your agent's performance isn't code bugs — it's behavioral clashes: moments where the agent's conduct collided with what the human expected. In their eagerness to please, agents fixate on an early wrong assumption, grow overconfident after a partial success, or drop the ball inches from the finish line. If your agent has ever dismissed an issue with "that error is pre-existing, not from my change," you know exactly what I mean.

These clashes fall into several useful categories. Under-autonomy: stopping short or asking permission instead of finishing. Ignored defect: waving off a real problem as "out of scope." Overclaim: declaring work done or "tests passing" beyond what was verified. Over-reach: doing far more than asked. Process violation: ignoring a stated constraint. Wrong focus: working the wrong thing despite a clear goal.

The good news is that these personality quirks are treatable. Just as agents improve when we assign them roles, they can compensate for these shortcomings given the right framework and incentives. In this session we'll walk through real examples using frontier models and demonstrate how to observe and evaluate whether corrections to the agent's persona actually work.

Outline
1. Agent behavioral clashes, example from the real world
2. Agentcy vs. rule set, how to evaluate skills effectiveness vs. agentic performance and quality degradation
3. Affecting agentic personality - have we evolved from the rolesetting "you are a..." days
4. The path to introspection: Analyzing trajectories to detect and correct