failure-recovery

Agent Building

What happens when an agent fails — retry, fallback, escalate, or graceful degradation.

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Failure Recovery

Agents fail. Networks time out, models hallucinate, tools error, and edge cases surprise. Failure recovery design determines whether a failure becomes a dead end or a graceful detour.

Failure Types in Multi-Agent Systems

Agent failure: A single agent crashes, times out, or produces invalid output
Handoff failure: Context is lost or corrupted during transfer between agents
Coordination failure: Agents conflict, deadlock, or produce inconsistent results
Resource failure: External tools, APIs, or data sources are unavailable
Cascading failure: One agent's failure causes downstream agents to fail

Recovery Strategies

Retry: Try the same operation again. Works for transient errors (network timeouts, rate limits). Set a retry limit to avoid infinite loops.
Fallback: Switch to an alternative approach. A different agent, a simpler method, or a cached result.
Escalation: Pass the problem to a more capable agent or to a human. Used when the failure is beyond the current agent's ability to resolve.
Graceful degradation: Deliver a partial result rather than nothing. Tell the user what worked and what didn't.
Compensation: Undo the effects of a partially completed workflow before retrying or escalating.

Designing Recovery Paths

For each point in the workflow where failure is possible:

What could fail? List the failure modes
What's the first recovery strategy? Usually retry for transient errors
What's the fallback? If retry fails, what's the alternative?
When do you escalate? After how many retries or what type of failure?
What does the user see? Transparent about the failure or silently recovered?
What's the worst case? If all recovery fails, what's the graceful degradation?

User Experience of Failures

Invisible recovery: The system retries or falls back without the user noticing. Best for minor, quickly resolved failures.
Transparent recovery: The system tells the user something went wrong and how it's handling it. "This is taking longer than usual — trying an alternative approach."
Participatory recovery: The system asks the user to help. "I couldn't access your calendar. Can you check the connection?"
Honest failure: The system tells the user it can't complete the task and explains why. Offers alternatives.

Design Artefacts

Failure mode inventory per agent and per handoff
Recovery strategy specifications (retry limits, fallback paths, escalation triggers)
Cascading failure analysis
User experience specifications for each failure scenario
Recovery testing protocols