Autonomous AI DevOps and coding agents such as Claude Code, Devin, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot are increasingly trusted to troubleshoot deployment failures, configure CI/CD pipelines, and manage local multi-container development environments.

Yet, when developers ask an agent to "write an end-to-end test script" or "debug the backend network connection" , they can encounter a common problem: container topology hallucination .

For example:

Hallucinating service hostnames: Calling localhost:5432 instead of the internal network alias db:5432 .

Port confusion: Guessing incorrect host-to-container port mappings, such as assuming Redis is exposed on 6380 when the Compose file maps 6379:6379 .

Missing volume mounts: Assuming persistent file paths that do not match the configured mounts.

Dependency blind spots: Missing depends_on relationships or health-check conditions such as service_healthy .

Why Does This Happen?

Large language models (LLMs) generate responses based on learned patterns and the context…