One post tagged with "data-quality"

I watched an agent produce a message to a payments topic with a field called total_price. The schema expected total_amount. The message was accepted — no validation, no error, no warning — serialized as JSON, and dropped into the topic. A downstream consumer tried to deserialize it, failed on the missing total_amount field, and routed it to the dead-letter queue. Thirty thousand messages later, someone noticed.

The agent didn't make a mistake in reasoning. It made a mistake in vocabulary. It had no way to know that the field was called total_amount and not total_price, because nothing told it the schema. The agent was schema-blind.

This is the default state of every AI agent interacting with Kafka today.