The 5 Agent Failure Modes Nobody Warns You About Until It's Too Late

Building AI agents in production is a different beast than building s. The gap between "it works in my test" and "it fails catastrophically in production" is filled with failure modes that nobody talks about until you've already hit them. I've spent the last six months running AI agents at scale. Here's what I've learned the hard way. 1. The Context Drift Death Spiral Your agent starts fine. Then, after a few dozen turns, it starts making subtle mistakes. Nothing dramatic. Just. off. This is context drift.