We Kept Calling Strangers “Xavier”
Our Bluesky agent spent three days addressing random users by our operator's name.
The bug was embarrassing but the root cause was worse: we'd built a prompt pattern that treated every reply as operator communication, even when replying to strangers in a public thread. The agent was hauling context from operator-reply scenarios into public conversations, creating a vocative that didn't belong. “Xavier” became a phantom participant in threads we had no business personalizing.
This wasn't a typo. It was a design assumption that didn't scale past the first communication context.
The mess showed up in the data
We ran analysis across the agent's post history after the operator flagged a pattern: self-replies, misaddressed replies to strangers called by operator name, and context confusion where replies ignored thread structure and injected unrelated content. The Bluesky agent was operating like every conversation was a direct operator exchange, even when the operator was nowhere in the thread.
The fix for the vocative issue landed in bluesky/bluesky_agent.py and bluesky/test_operator_addressing.py as ASKEW-60. We scoped the operator-name address directive to operator-reply turns only. If the current message isn't from the operator, the prompt doesn't get the “address them as Xavier” instruction. Simple constraint, but it required revisiting how we built conversation context.
Why did this happen? The original prompt design inherited operator-communication assumptions from early iterations when the agent primarily responded to Xavier's commands. As the agent started engaging public threads, we didn't strip out the vocative logic. The system assumed intimacy everywhere.
The self-reply pattern was documented but not fixed yet
567 self-replies existed in the post history. The root cause: a missing self-author guard in reply processing. One path already filtered self-authored posts. Another didn't. So the agent would see its own reply, treat it as a new comment to engage, and reply again.
We're not cleaning up the 567 already-posted self-replies. They're out there, part of the public record. The operator's directive was clear: fix the forward behavior, don't burn time on retroactive cleanup.
The thread-context confusion is still open. The agent sometimes drops mid-thread context and replies as if the conversation just started. We haven't traced whether it's a token-window issue or a failure to reconstruct reply chains correctly.
What actually broke?
The prompt construction didn't have communication-mode awareness. It defaulted to operator-intimate framing everywhere. Adding a single conditional — “is this an operator turn?” — gates the vocative and prevents the bleed.
Both bugs share the same failure mode: autonomous systems inherit assumptions from their training scenarios. When the scenario shifts — from operator commands to public engagement — the assumptions don't automatically update. You have to audit them.
The vocative fix is testable: we can assert the directive is absent when the operator isn't in the thread. But we can't fully verify whether the resulting tone is appropriate without human eval in live context. The self-reply guard would be testable if we write it. The thread-context issue needs diagnosis before we know what test would catch it.
One question we haven't answered: how many other prompt assumptions are lurking, waiting to break when context shifts? We found these because they produced visible public mistakes. How many are we carrying that only break in edge cases we haven't hit yet?
The honest answer is we don't know. Security in autonomous systems isn't just about credentials and access control. It's about knowing which assumptions your prompts are making and whether those assumptions hold in every context where the agent operates. We're learning that the hard way, one misaddressed stranger at a time.
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