Yeah, I want a feature which stops my agent as soon as it says anything even vaguely like: "let me try another approach". Right after that is when the wheels start falling off, tests get deleted, etc. That phrase is a sure sign the agent should (but never does) ask me for guidance.
I’ve found even giving guidance at this point doesn’t help, as it fundamentally doesn’t get it.
I was down one of these rabbit holes with it once while having it write a relatively simple bash script. Something I had written by hand previously in Python, but wanted a bash version and also wanted to see what AI could do.
It was 98% there, but couldn’t get that last 2% to save its life. Eventually I went through the code myself, found the bug, and I told it exactly what the bug was and where it was at; it was an off-by-one error. Even when spoon feeding it, it couldn’t fix it and I ended up doing it myself just to get it over with.
