My agent writes the words. A script builds every date, path and JSON field
The weekday kept coming out wrong in my agent. Reading the time from the system was never the issue. It would take that time, compute the day on its own, and get it wrong. So now a hook feeds it the current time along with a two week calendar on every message I send. If a reply contains a date that doesn't line up, the agent has to rewrite it.
From then on, I stopped letting it generate anything that a program would read. Frontmatter, JSON, config values, file paths, URLs, dates. A script handles all of those, and it also decides pass or fail. The model's only job is writing the plain text.
When I genuinely can't avoid handing a decision to a model, I don't trust a single one. Gemini will review whatever Claude came up with. For the larger tasks, Codex and Grok get pulled in too.
Are you still letting your agent pick dates or decide pass or fail anywhere?
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An agent wrote the narrative around pipeline data, and the report ended up with a confident metric nobody had measured. It took a day to realize the model had invented a placeholder to make the prose flow. Splitting words from numbers doesn't stop the text from faking its own facts.