Why Agents Fail Silently in Production: The Hidden Danger of Sanitized Memory
Alternative_Pin9598 · reddit · 2026-08-12
The author's team reproduced the exact failure mode behind Gartner's 40% agent cancellation stat: agents work perfectly in demos but quietly break in production, going unnoticed for days.
Root Cause: Their durable-agent feature silently stripped out tool-call records when saving run history for cross-execution memory. In subsequent runs, the agent would review its history, see "answered without calling tools," and adopt it as the correct pattern. Eventually, the agent stopped doing actual work but still produced plausible outputs and reported "success."
The Fix:
- Treat each run as stateless by default unless persistent memory is explicitly enabled.
- Ensure tool-call records round-trip honestly without being silently sanitized.
- Runs that skip tools must explicitly report that behavior instead of returning a generic "success."
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