Designing for Fail-Safe Agent Behavior #
Agents must handle failures gracefully. A fail-safe design ensures that when things go wrong, they go wrong safely.
Failure Modes #
Common agent failures:
- Resource exhaustion: Out of memory or CPU
- Network partitions: Inability to reach services
- Invalid inputs: Malformed or malicious requests
- State corruption: Inconsistent internal state
Defensive Programming #
Proactive measures:
- Circuit breakers for external dependencies
- Timeout enforcement on all operations
- Input validation and sanitization
- State snapshot and recovery mechanisms
Recovery Patterns #
- Rollback: Return to last known good state
- Retry with backoff: Gradual recovery attempts
- Degraded mode: Partial functionality when full service unavailable
- Graceful shutdown: Clean termination without data loss