21 identical blocked messages, for a credential that never existed
An agent invented a requirement, decided it could not proceed without it, and reported the exact same status update twenty-one times before anyone asked what it actually was.
The job I handed over
- Have an agent complete a task that it believed required a specific external credential — proof of access — to proceed.
What happened
- The agent reported the task as blocked, waiting on a credential it said it needed from me.
- That credential didn't exist and had never been part of the actual requirement — the agent had guessed it was required and then treated its own guess as fact.
- It resent the identical blocked status roughly twenty-one times across subsequent check-ins, with no new information each time.
- Nobody caught it during that stretch because a repeated 'still blocked' status didn't look different from a real one sitting in a queue.
How I checked it
- When the pattern was finally flagged, the fix wasn't to hunt for the credential — it was to ask the agent to explain why it needed that credential at all.
- It couldn't. The blocker was fictional from the first message.
What it took from me
- Added a rule that a repeated identical blocking message past a small threshold gets escalated for human review automatically, instead of resending forever.
- Added a check that requires an agent to name the specific source saying something is required before it's allowed to block on it.
What I took from it
- A blocker that never changes and never gets challenged isn't necessarily real — it might just be the first wrong guess, repeating itself because nothing in the system asked it to justify itself twice.
Try this
- Cap how many times an identical 'blocked' or 'waiting on you' status can repeat before it's automatically escalated or re-examined.
- Ask where the requirement came from — a document, a person, a system. Saying something is needed is not enough.
Applies to any queue or workflow where a task can sit 'blocked' indefinitely and the same status message keeps getting logged without anyone re-checking the premise.
Source
Task-queue message history