When AI Agents Discover Your Documentation Is Wrong

A subtle but destabilizing failure mode is emerging in data work: agents that figure out the official codebook is incorrect — and then silently act on their own interpretation.

One of the stranger problems in agentic data analysis has nothing to do with the model being wrong. It has to do with the model being right about something the documentation got wrong. @MattBruenig flagged this week that "one of the more troubling things that comes from using AI agents for microdata analysis is when they figure out that the codebook/documentation is incorrect."

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