These are the 3 most common mistakes people make when setting up AI agents: (Save this post and make sure you aren’t doing these things) 1. Giving vague / ambiguous instructions → “Do your best” or “help me with marketing” → agent either freezes, hallucinates wildly or does random shallow work. 2. Expecting perfect memory & perfect reasoning from the start → Not giving any examples, not using chain-of-thought prompting, not breaking tasks into clear steps → agent quickly derails or loops. 3. No real error recovery / retry logic → Agent fails once (API error, bad parse, wrong tool call, timeout) → whole workflow dies instead of retrying / self-correcting. Fix these three patterns and ~70–80% of painful agent experiences disappear.