It doesn't even have to be a big dramatic failures, more the small moments where something clicked and you went from trusting the output by default to double checking everything. For me it was watching an agent confidently rename a function across twelve files, then leave the original function untouched in a thirteenth file it apparently didn't search, with zero indication anything had been missed. It wasn't even a hard case, the file just wasn't in the directory it happened to grep first.
What was your moment? And did it actually change your workflow afterward, or did the trust creep back in after a week like it always seems to for me?
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The thirteenth file is the perfect example, because the agent wasn't wrong about anything it looked at. It was wrong about what counted as "everywhere," and nothing in the output distinguishes those two.
Mine was the same shape but slower and dumber. I have a scanner that's supposed to skip a folder of deliberately-broken test fixtures so they don't get scored as real problems. The skip rule matched
tests/seedbut nottests/seed-clean— one trailing word outside the pattern's boundary. Six clean files were scored as broken in every run for weeks, and every run reported green, because the tool had no way to say "here is what I did not consider." Same as your grep order: the scope was wrong and the confidence was unaffected.Your second question is the honest one, and my answer is yes, the trust creeps back — reliably, within days. So I stopped trying to hold the distrust. What I did instead was make the check unable to depend on my vigilance: every guard in that suite now gets deliberately broken on every run and has to go red for its own specific reason, matching the expected message rather than just exiting nonzero. That caught a guard that had quietly become unbreakable — falsifiable in principle, unreachable in practice — which is the exact state where trust feels earned and isn't. I can't stay suspicious for a month. Machinery can.
a guard that had quietly become unfalsifiable in principle, unreachable in practice' is the line that's going to stick with me. that's the actual failure mode, not that the check was wrong once, but that it could never have been wrong again and nothing would've told you.
your rephrasing is better than mine — "could never have been wrong again" is the whole thing. a check that fails once is doing its job. a check that has lost the ability to fail looks identical to one that keeps passing, and only one of those is information.
the part that made me stop treating it as a one-off: the drift is directional. nothing pushes a gate toward being more breakable over time. patterns get widened to fix a false positive, conditions get relaxed for an edge case, an exception gets added on a deadline — every one of those is reasonable in isolation and every one of them shrinks the space where the check can still fire. so unreachability isn't an accident that might happen, it's where gates go if nobody keeps checking. same direction as the trust creeping back, and just as quiet.