Must-read paper from Microsoft Research and Georgia Tech.

This one has lots of great insights.

They used 163,487 Reddit posts about AI agents and surveyed 73 experienced agent users to map how delegated agent work goes wrong.

The result is MANDATE, a taxonomy of 23 failure categories in seven groups. Each describes an agent that finishes the job in a way the user didn't expect.

Users rated the most severe failures as the hardest to notice.

People who had already run into a failure found it easier to spot than people who only thought it was possible.

The most common failures are often the least studied.

Agents that keep running and spend time and compute without making progress are among the most commonly reported failures, and they have the thinnest research base.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34748

Chat with Paper: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/babysitting-ai-agents-a-user-centered-taxonomy-and-study-of-agentic-delegation-f-2610.34748