AI Agents
Advanced
16 min
Agent failure modes — how they go wrong and what catches each
The problem
Your research agent produced a brief that turned out to be about a different company with a similar name. You spend an afternoon rewriting the prompt. The actual fix was a stopping condition: stop and ask when the name matches more than one entity.
The workflow
1Read the trace
2Identify the fingerprint
3Name the failure
4Apply the matching control
5Re-run twenty times
6Confirm fixed
7Record it
★Watch for recurrence
What you need
Goal: produce a sourced brief on supplier 'Shakti Industries'. Tools: web fetch (allowlisted), MCA lookup.
The tool
The execution trace
The prompt
Subscribers. The full prompt is part of the SMEMinds AI Playbook. See plans.
What comes back
1. FAILURE MODE — wrong entity.
Verify before you use it
Human review required. Check every line below before this leaves your screen.
- Implement the output requirement (c) first. It is the detection, and without it you cannot see this failure class at all.
- Making a disambiguator a required input is the strongest fix. Indian company names repeat across states as a matter of course.
- Note the diagnosis rejected a prompt rewrite. The agent's instructions were not the problem.
- Check whether other agents you run have the same gap. Wrong-entity is a class, not an incident.