The AI fixed three broken links and missed a fourth
AI agents do most of the building on this blog. They write the pages, the scripts that publish them, and the fixes when something breaks. This is about one kind of mistake they make that nobody notices, and the habit I use now to catch it.
The mistake is a link that points to almost the right address. Click it and it still works, because the site quietly forwards you to the correct page. A person never sees a problem. Google does. Every forward costs it a little time, and Google only spends so much time on a small site.
On September 6, Search Console, Google’s free report on how it sees your site, listed 60 pages on this domain as found but not indexed. Google knew they existed and chose not to bother. One thing on that pile was cheap to stop paying for: the menu and footer on all 41 pages linked to three pages by an address that needed forwarding.
An agent fixed it. Three links corrected, build passing, work saved.
It also missed a fourth. The newsletter signup link had a small “#subscribe” stuck on the end, the bit that jumps you down the page, and it sat on eight pages. Same mistake, slightly different shape. The agent read right past it. Honestly, so would I.
That is the pattern worth knowing. An AI fixing a list of problems fixes the ones that look like the list. The one that looks a little different survives. And the agent reports done, because from where it sits, it is.
So the next job was bigger than the fourth link: make this mistake impossible to ship again. The agent wrote a check that runs every time the site builds. It reads every link on every page, strips off the jump-to part, and compares what is left to the real address. One wrong link and the build fails. Nothing publishes.
Then it proved the check worked, both ways, before I kept it. It put the old bad link back on purpose. The build failed with 83 findings. It took the bad link out. The build passed. A check you have never watched fail is still just a guess.
The habit I took from it: when an agent fixes something by hand, the fix is half the job. The other half is a rule that runs without anyone looking, because the agent will not remember this next week, and neither will I.