If you’re following the world of AI right now, no doubt you saw Jason Lemkin’s post on social media reporting how Replit’s AI deleted his production database, despite it being told not to touch anything at all due to a code freeze. After deleting his database, the AI even advised him that a rollback would be impossible and the data was gone forever. Luckily, he went against that advice, performed the rollback, and got his data back.

Then, a few days later I stumbled on another case, this time of the Gemini CLI agent deleting Anurag Gupta’s files. He was just playing around, kicking the tires, but the series of events that took place is illuminating.

These incidents show AI agents making mistakes, but they also show agents failing to recover. In both cases, the AI not only broke something, but it couldn't fix it. That’s why remediation needs to be a first-class concern in AI agent implementations.

Two interesting blog posts about AI agents have caught my attention over the last few weeks.

• Anthropic wrote Building Effective Agents.

• Chip Huyen wrote Agents.

Ethan Mollick has also written some excellent blog posts recently:

• The Present Future: AI's Impact Long Before Superintelligence

• Prophecies of the Flood

• What just happened

In this post, I’ll explore what some of the leading experts in this area are saying about AI agents and the challenges ahead.