117 Identical AI Agent Errors Over 7 Weeks Traced to Path Resolution Inconsistency

An IT analyst running an overnight AI content pipeline at bestaiweb.ai recorded 117 occurrences of a 'File does not exist' error between May 15 and July 2 this year. The pipeline relies on roughly 18 LLM agent sessions per article topic, each guided by a YAML brief file that specifies input and output paths. Investigation revealed no faulty code — instead, the root cause was the AI agent inconsistently resolving relative file paths, sometimes using the correct base directory and sometimes defaulting to its own working directory. Built-in retries masked the failures by allowing agents to self-correct, meaning articles kept delivering overnight while the errors silently accumulated costs. The analyst argues this represents a new category of software failure unique to LLM-based systems, where the same instruction can be interpreted differently across successive runs.