Debugging Agents: Why Prompt Tweaks Can't Fix Stale State
· 8 min read
In the earlier deep-agent case study (Browsr), I focused on architecture. Here I'll stay grounded in one debugging failure I hit in a maps agent—a failure that looked like a prompt problem but wasn't. The agent behaved correctly in chat, the UI looked correct, and yet the results were consistently from the wrong area. I tried the usual prompt tweaks: stronger instructions, "be careful," "use the visible map," retries. None of it moved the needle.
Here's how map state flows through the agent loop and where it can drift:
