Smash Stories: The Bug That Whispered for Two Weeks Before I Heard It

Short summary

An AI phone-control agent was silently misreading bank balances 20% of the time because OCR confused currency symbols with digits and commas with decimal points—no crashes, just wrong numbers sent to contacts. The root cause was architectural: trusting a single unreliable OCR pass with financial data and no verification. A three-layer fix (regex format validation, double-read confirmation, range validation) cut the error rate to 6% and made failures visible instead of silent, with the full open-source code shared on GitHub.

• •AI agent silently misread financial data 20% of the time due to OCR errors on banking app screens
• •Root cause was architectural—trusting a single OCR pass with no verification, not the OCR engine itself
• •Three-layer defense-in-depth (format validation, double-read confirmation, range validation) reduced errors to 6% and made failures visible

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.