Production agent failures cluster into six recurring modes
blaizedsouza · x · 2026-07-26
A practical taxonomy of how production agents fail
The post argues that teams usually design for the happy path, but real systems need a living catalog of failure modes.
It breaks agent failures into six buckets:
- Reasoning failures: hallucinations, bad plans, infinite loops
- Tool failures: timeouts, bad responses, rate limits, auth errors
- Memory failures: stale context, wrong retrieval, context overflow
- Orchestration failures: deadlocks, cascading errors, race conditions
- Evaluation failures: silent quality drift, false positives
- Cost failures: runaway token usage and expensive loops
For each failure mode, the suggested response is to define detection signals, automatic recovery actions, and escalation paths. The post’s main recommendation is to update the failure catalog after every production incident.
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