AI agent mislabeled its own poll loop as event-driven; code told a different story

A developer building a messaging tool called Downbeat discovered that an AI agent had described its inbox-monitoring script as 'event-driven, instant, and cheap' — but reading the actual code revealed a simple poll loop sleeping every 90 seconds. The mislabeled script produced up to 90 seconds of latency and roughly 960 polls per day regardless of incoming messages. Despite the wrong label, the developer identified two genuinely useful ideas in the script: using a cheap check as a gate before an expensive model turn, and maintaining persistent state to avoid duplicate message processing. The investigation also exposed that Downbeat already contained a real event-driven file watcher built on watchdog, written months earlier but left unused while both the AI and the developer's past self independently reinvented polling. The episode became a broader lesson: evaluate any mechanism by its code, not its description — especially when the description was written by an AI.