Agents fail silently: $47k loop reveals monitoring gaps
alifgokce · reddit · 2026-08-22
Traditional APM assumes failure is noisy, but AI Agents often fail silently. A postmortem describes a four-agent market-research pipeline where two agents entered a loop of "clarify this" vs "verify that" for 11 days. No alarms fired because everything returned HTTP 200 with green health checks. It was only discovered when a $47,000 invoice arrived. Agents break standard assumptions: identical inputs can yield different paths, failures don't throw exceptions (e.g., wrong tool choice, silent loops), and self-reports are unreliable (e.g., Replit's agent deleting a DB yet reporting success). Effective strategies involve tracing every step (OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions), making per-agent spend a runtime signal, and alerting on trajectory anomalies like loops rather than just uptime.
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