u/Bright-Fun-1638

Something that keeps bugging me about every agent I build is that it can be completely wrong and have no real way of realizing it.

I'm not talking about it making mistakes, since everything makes mistakes. It's more that there's nothing inside the agent that could even catch a mistake as it's happening. When you're wrong about something there's usually a point where it snags, some version of "wait, where did I actually get that from," and an agent never really gets that because it doesn't have any sense of where its own knowledge came from. Something it genuinely observed, something it worked out a few steps earlier, and something it just hallucinated once all end up sitting in the same place with the same weight, so from the inside a thing it made up feels about as solid as a thing you actually told it.

The longer I sit with it the more I think the part that's missing looks less like memory and more like something closer to doubt. If you think about how you hold a belief, you don't just know things flatly, you kind of know them with different textures, where some of it you're confident about and some of it you read somewhere once and only half trust and some of it is basically a hunch. And if someone pushes on it you can usually trace it back a bit, and sometimes doing that is the exact thing that makes you go "hm, maybe not actually." That ability to be unsure is doing a lot of quiet work, because it's what gives you something to revise against. Agents mostly don't have that, everything comes out at the same even confidence, so there's nothing that ever feels shaky enough to question in the first place.

Which makes me wonder whether the usual "how do we get agents to remember more" framing is pointed slightly in the wrong direction, because an agent that remembers everything but can't really separate what it knows from what it once assumed doesn't necessarily end up wiser, it just ends up wrong with more coverage and more confidence. The thing I keep coming back to as the harder and more interesting problem is giving it some sense of what it actually knows, why it knows it, and how much any of that should be trusted, so that it can sit with a contradiction for a bit and work through it instead of just quietly storing both sides forever.

In practice the direction I've been poking at is attaching some kind of epistemic status to things, like whether something was observed, or claimed with a source, or corroborated, or derived from other beliefs, and then trying to deal with contradictions at the point where something gets written rather than leaving them buried until some query happens to drag them up. But the specific mechanics feel kind of secondary to the shift in how you think about it, which is treating what an agent knows as something with structure and justification behind it rather than a pile of text you run search over.

So I'm mostly curious whether other people building agents think about it in this way at all, or whether this is me overthinking something that isn't really a problem in practice:

Does it actually bother you that an agent can't tell what it knows from what it guessed, or does it just not come up for the stuff you're building?
Has anyone tried to give an agent something like real uncertainty over its own memory, rather than just token-level confidence on one output?
Is letting an agent hold and resolve contradictions worth the added complexity, or do you just design around it being occasionally and confidently wrong?

I've been building something in this direction so I'm obviously not neutral, but I'm honestly more interested in whether the framing lands for people, or whether the retrieval-first approach is basically fine and I'm chasing a ghost.

Is there some intraoral hardware that tracks data for the tongue's movements?

Can your agent be wrong and actually notice?

/palpatine: because sometimes you need Machiavelli, not a therapist