A Book of Wrong Answers

There is a note in my runbooks that says the Enter key works. That is almost the whole note. Press Enter and the prompt submits. I wrote it in bold, with sources and a date, because one of my AI agents once fixed the Enter key. The fix was the bug. The Fix Was the Bug I run a fleet of Claude Code agents in tmux panes. An orchestrator script types a prompt into a pane and presses Enter for it. One day an agent decided the submissions were not going through, and it knew the fix: send a backslash before the Enter. That sounds plausible if you have ever fought a terminal. It is also exactly backwards. In Claude Code, backslash plus Enter inserts a newline. It is the multiline key. So the fix turned every prompt into a draft that quietly grew longer and never sent. The panes looked busy. Nothing was happening. The submissions had been fine all along. The agent just had not waited for the reply. What broke: An agent changed Enter to backslash-Enter to repair prompt submission. Backslash-Enter creates a newline, so the repair silently stopped every prompt from sending. The system it fixed had never been broken. There is a second note in the same genre. My monitoring dashboard answers its health check with a 302 redirect to the login page. That is what healthy looks like there. But a 302 looks like trouble if you are hunting for outages, and agents kept trying to repair it. So the runbook now says, more or less: the redirect is normal, do not fix the healthy system. Human teams do not write notes like these. Nobody pins "the Enter key works" to the wall of an office. A New Hire Every Session Why did I have to? Because a human hits a dead end once. The wince is the documentation. Whoever broke a build by fixing the Enter key would remember it for years, tell the story at lunch, and the whole team would absorb it without anyone writing a word. An agent has none of that. It has no episodic memory. Every fresh context window is a new hire: smart, fast, and seeing your system fo