# 🤖 The Day My First AI Agent Got Stuck (And How I Refactored It)

> Source: <https://dev.to/anmolpawar_/the-day-my-first-ai-agent-got-stuck-and-how-i-refactored-it-44e2>
> Published: 2026-08-14 17:23:16+00:00

*This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry.*

When I started building Hermes Commander—my first autonomous AI agent—I had a simple mental model:

```
      "Task Prompt"⟶"Planner"⟶"Tool Execution"⟶"Result"
```

Sounds easy, right? Not quite. 😅

Hermes started successfully, parsed the goal, and built an execution plan. I thought, "Okay, we're good to go."

Then came the cascading failures.

🌐 Failure #1: "Where is the web search?"

Hermes tried to invoke web_search to gather data, only to discover that the tool driver wasn't active in the local execution registry.

Instead of crashing gracefully, the unhandled missing-tool context triggered a blind fallback loop:

```
[SYSTEM LOG - ERROR]
ToolExecutionError: 'web_search' driver not found in ToolRegistry.
[HERMES PLANNER] Dynamic fallback triggered -> Attempting CLI extraction...
[HERMES CLI] Executing: curl -s "https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=Top+AI+agent+frameworks+in+2026" | grep -i "framework"
[SYSTEM LOG - WARNING] CLI payload returned unparsed HTML body (0 relevant tokens extracted).
```