7-item checklist to stop your agents and automations from failing silently
shannonpieter · reddit · 2026-10-18
An automation practitioner shares the checklist he now builds in from day one, after seeing small-business automations quietly stop for weeks: add a daily heartbeat ("did this process at least one item in 24h?") since error alerts miss dead triggers; log every run to one table; make steps idempotent using source record IDs; validate critical input fields and park weird data for review; keep a manual one-click rerun; track credential expiry dates (most "mystery outages" are expired tokens); and for AI steps, require structured validated output with low-confidence cases routed to a human. Works in n8n, Make, Zapier or plain code.
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