Failure Patterns

Failure patterns describe recurring ways autonomous systems can lose coherence. They are not exhaustive. They are early labels for problems that should become easier to detect and discuss.

Local Optimisation Drift

An agent, workflow, service, or team improves its local objective while weakening the larger system. The local action may be rational in isolation and harmful in aggregate.

Context Collapse

The system acts as if it has enough context when key context is missing, stale, contradictory, or outside the current execution window.

Policy Bypass

Execution avoids, ignores, misinterprets, or routes around a required policy checkpoint. This may happen through bad design, unclear authority, tool misuse, or accumulated exceptions.

Recursive Delegation Drift

An agent delegates to another agent, which delegates again, causing intent, authority, and constraints to degrade with each handoff.

Silent Workflow Degradation

A workflow continues to run while its quality, coverage, timeliness, or alignment declines. Basic success signals remain green while the real outcome weakens.

Hidden Micro Drift

The system appears stable at a high level while smaller internal conditions deteriorate. Trust may erode, technical debt may accumulate, incentives may distort, alignment may weaken, or resilience may decline before any obvious external failure appears.

Runaway Automation

An automated process repeats, expands, retries, spends, or modifies state beyond intended bounds because stop conditions are weak or missing.

Conflicting Agents

Multiple agents take actions that are each locally valid but mutually incompatible. Conflict may appear only after shared state, cost, or external systems are affected.

Stale Memory

The system treats outdated stored context as current truth. Stale memory can preserve old policies, old assumptions, obsolete facts, or previous exceptions.

Authority Confusion

The system cannot determine who or what has permission to decide, approve, override, escalate, or act. Confusion can lead to delay, overreach, or unauthorised execution.

Missing Escalation Path

The system encounters ambiguity, conflict, or risk but has no defined route to a responsible actor or control plane. Execution either stalls or continues without adequate authority.

Misdirected Coherence

The system remains internally consistent while moving toward an outcome that no longer matches declared intent. Teams, agents, or workflows may agree with each other and still move in the wrong direction.