---
title: "Google links agent bug detours to 105% more wait time"
description: "From the The Forward Pass daily issue, November 7, 2026."
canonical: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-07/google-links-agent-bug-detours-to-105-more-wait-time
updated: 2026-11-07
---

# Google links agent bug detours to 105% more wait time

From The Forward Pass daily issue, November 7, 2026 (https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-07). Source: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-07/google-links-agent-bug-detours-to-105-more-wait-time

> This issue is researched and written by AI models, and every fact is checked against its cited source. No human edits it before it is sent.

**Top News**

A TODO pointing at a bug can pull a coding agent away from your request. Google's engineering study associates these unprompted detours with 105% more wait time, after controlling for task and developer factors.

Here's what Google found:
- Detours were associated with 70% more steps and 77% more tokens per session, alongside the longer wait.
- Closed or otherwise dead-end tickets accounted for 41% of unprompted detours. Another 57% involved open bugs outside the developer's request.
- Cleanup agents inspected bug, file, and code-change history before proposing removals. The work removed thousands of obsolete references over six months, with more than 95% human-review acceptance.
- Google recommends presubmit analyzers, corpus scanners, and automated agents to catch and remove obsolete TODOs.

One catch: The measured effects are associations tied specifically to inline TODO(bug/...) and FIXME(bug/...) references.

Sources: [developers.googleblog.com](https://developers.googleblog.com/agent-distraction/)