Users get stuck halfway through a workflow, not on day one
Where product tours help, why users get stuck somewhere else entirely, and what an AI agent inside the product has to get right to take that moment on.
AskVerb
Safety · Building · Reliability
Where product tours help, why users get stuck somewhere else entirely, and what an AI agent inside the product has to get right to take that moment on.
Where product tours help, why users get stuck somewhere else entirely, and what an AI agent inside the product has to get right to take that moment on.
Why the most common feature request is for something already shipped, why docs and tooltips rarely fix it, and what does.
A real jailbreak attempt on our landing page, why it failed, and the six guardrails any public AI agent needs, including two that readers added.
The setup that used to mean a dashboard, three tabs and a key to paste is now one sentence to the coding agent you already have open.
The whole setup as a conversation you can copy: the prompts, what your coding agent does with each one, and the two moments it stops to ask you.
Why most of a lawyer's time in practice software is small updates after court, and what an assistant needs before a firm lets it make them.
Moderation queues, bulk changes and broadcasts: what an agent can take off a marketplace operator's hands, and the confirmations bulk actions need.
The demo takes a weekend and the sign-off takes a quarter. The identity mistake that causes it, and the day our own test suite turned out to be pointing at production.
Why most of what people do in a scheduling tool is procedures rather than questions, and what an assistant has to get right to take them on.
Why a build takes down a small server when the app it produces runs fine, and the one-line cgroup fix.
The 200 that lied: why a successful response is not evidence, and the per-tool success shape that stops an agent claiming work it never did.
Why "failed" produces a guess, the four parts of an error a model can act on, and why descriptions are advisory but validation is binding.
The 23-call spiral, why per-tool caps let a model walk the tool list, and budgeting failures by cause.
Why the assistant cannot see your session, why it needs a function and not a token, and the encoding detail that fails every signature silently.
A real shared-device leak: permissions held, the transcript did not. Keying on the subject, not the token, and why sign-out has no single choke point.
Why offering a tool list is not enforcement, the switch that is the allowlist, and bounding what an obeyed injection can reach.
The failure that cannot report itself, the second directive everybody forgets, and why strict-dynamic makes your allowlist irrelevant.
Run it for real against development data, the five cases worth deliberately breaking, and why a timer on real execution backfires.
Why prompt engineering cannot fix a routing problem, the asymmetric classifier, and the settings that silently stop applying after a model swap.
Documentation chatbot, build your own, or embedded action assistant: the one question that decides between them.
Tools instead of retrieval, the user's own permissions instead of a service account, and why the hard part is reporting failure honestly.
Classification, confirmation with real values, and the difference between an action verified and an action merely claimed.
The isolation boundary, the tables that deliberately sit outside it, and why the loud failure is the one worth engineering for.
Why a model asking 'shall I?' is not a confirmation, what the card must show, and what to do when nobody answers it.