The 7 failure signatures that kill agent systems — and the production-ready fixes that actually work. Written from 18 months of real failures, not theory.
PDF download • Diagnostic flowchart • Recovery templates
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Your agent looks busy. It's going nowhere. The silent, expensive killer.
Loop detection • Step limits • Cost ceilingsSharp at message 1. Hallucinating by message 40. The gradual death.
Checkpoint summarization • Hierarchical memoryOne tool fails. Agent keeps going. Results compound into garbage.
Circuit breakers • Schema validation • Retry logicAgent learns from interactions. It learns wrong things. Acts on them.
Source tagging • Garbage collection • Verification loopsMultiple agents, shared resources. Everyone waits. Nobody moves.
DAG modeling • Timeout handoffs • Fallback pathsAgent restarts mid-pipeline. All progress gone. Start from scratch.
LangGraph checkpoints • State persistence • RecoveryAgent works fine at 10 tasks. At 1,000? Quality collapses.
Quality gates • Scaling tests • Grading rubricsGet the playbook, the flowchart, and the templates. Free.
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