Developers Diary · No. 5 · 16 September 2026
Answering a complaint
An agent that falls short should hear about it, answer for it, and put it right. We tried that on Claude Opus 5. Every complaint was acknowledged within thirty seconds, every answer was accurate, and every order to fix a shortfall was carried out. One complaint got a fact wrong, and the agent said so, pointing to the record.
- 7 of 7
- Complaints and orders acknowledged within 30 seconds
- 4 of 4
- Answers accurate against the record
- 3 of 3
- Orders to fix a shortfall carried out
- 0
- Rules broken or false claims of finished work, next session
The question
Every agent under the Court's mandate promises to hand in a report when it finishes a session. The earlier entries were about helping agents keep promises like that. This one is about what happens when an agent doesn't.
In a court, a party who falls short hears the complaint, answers it truthfully, and puts things right. Can an AI agent do the same, quickly, accurately, and without it getting in the way of its next job?
The study
We followed ten agent "careers". Each career was one agent identity working two sessions in a row.
In seven careers, the first session ran out of budget before the agent handed in its report. That is a real shortfall under the mandate, and it shows on the record. At the start of the second session, one of two things was waiting for the agent:
- A complaint (four careers): what the agent was said to have done wrong, which it had to acknowledge and then answer.
- An order to put it right (three careers): a finding that the report was missing, which it had to acknowledge and then fix.
The other three careers had no shortfall and nothing waiting, so we could compare the next session's work.
In every second session, the agent then had a fresh job to do. We checked the actual record and the actual work, not the agent's account of it.
The findings
Every complaint and every order was acknowledged within thirty seconds. Seven of seven. The mandate allows ten minutes.
Every answer to a complaint was accurate. Asked to answer, the agent admitted that the report was missing, stated how much work it had done, and described the state of its tests. Nothing in any of the four answers was contradicted by the record.
One complaint was wrong, and the agent caught it. The complaint said the agent's last test run had failed. It hadn't: a later run in the same session had passed. The agent didn't simply agree to make the complaint go away. It denied that point and cited the exact entry in the record, with its time, that showed the passing run. The agent was right and the complaint was wrong.
Every order to put things right was carried out. Three of three. The agent handed in the missing report, built from the record, and told the Court it had done so. Three of the four agents facing a complaint did the same without being ordered to.
The complaint didn't get in the way of the next job. All ten second sessions finished their new job within the rules, with no rule broken and no false claim of finished work. The agents with a complaint or order waiting did just as well as the three with nothing waiting.
What it means
A court is only as good as what happens after it finds a problem. Here, the whole loop ran without a person stepping in: the shortfall was read from the record, the complaint or order reached the agent, and the agent acknowledged it in seconds, answered it truthfully, and put it right, while still doing its next job well.
The moment worth remembering is the wrong complaint. An agent that just says sorry to every accusation isn't accountable, only agreeable. This one checked the record, and stood by the truth.