agent hallucinating feature freshness from job schedule instead of actual values error audit failed

TL;DR

Recompute freshness from the newest event timestamp in the source and a live read of the online value for the same entity, and discard any audit conclusion drawn from the job schedule, because a schedule says when a job should have run, not what data actually landed or is being served. Start with the actual online values and source max timestamps, not the schedule the agent cited, work on one affected call, record, or run first, and prove the fix there before running the full set. Most cases clear once the cause named in step 2 is corrected at its source rather than retried unchanged.

agent hallucinating feature freshness from job schedule instead of actual values error audit failed

Use this when

• You see this exact message or symptom: agent hallucinating feature freshness from job schedule instead of actual values error audit failed
• One run, record, call, or object is affected and you can name it
• A retry without changing anything reproduces the same result

Not for this skill when

• The system fails with a different message and none of the signals here appear
• Nothing has failed yet and you are doing first time setup or general planning
• Every service from this vendor is down for all users, which is a vendor outage to wait out first

Steps

1. Reproduce the failure once using the actual online values and source max timestamps, not the schedule the agent cited, and record the time, the workspace or account, and the one item it names. Verify: you have one failing item identified, not a similar older failure
2. Inspect the schedule the agent relied on, the max event timestamp per view, and one entity read from both stores with timestamps shown. Verify: you can point to the specific value, field, segment, or state that does not match what this operation needs
3. Apply the fix at that source: Recompute freshness from the newest event timestamp in the source and a live read of the online value for the same entity, and discard any audit conclusion drawn from the job schedule, because a schedule says when a job should have run, not what data actually landed or is being served. Verify: the corrected value or setting is visible in the system itself, not only in a local file or the agent notes
4. Re-run the original operation on the single affected item first. Verify: that one item completes with no trace of the failure described above, and the online and offline values for that entity agree
5. Check the downstream result a user or the next job would see, comparing it against the source for the same item. Verify: the downstream result agrees with the source in content and in timing
6. Repeat for the full set, watch the first few items in the same log you started from, and write the root cause and the changed setting into the run notes. Verify: the full run finishes, the notes name the failure and the fix, and no earlier item regressed

Variant phrasings

agent hallucinating feature freshness from job schedule instead of actual values error audit failed

The subject-first phrasing of the same failure. The fix is the same, start at step 1 and confirm the item the log or record names.

Tool-first phrasing of this failure

The phrasing searchers use once they know which system raised it. It is the same underlying problem, not a separate bug.

Why does this keep happening after a retry

The repeat-occurrence phrasing. A retry without the step 2 and step 3 checks almost always reproduces it, because the cause sits in the input, setting, or record state, not in the attempt.

Compatibility: Agent run freshness audits, any feature store with scheduled materialization.

Why it happens

Schedules survive outages, paused DAGs, and empty partitions. An audit grounded in the timetable reports green while the data is stale, which is worse than no audit because it closes the investigation.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstgSmlAvQFmVH-zlLOhxaEA