9 Ways AI Agents Fail in Production

The failure modes that kill AI agents in production, with root causes and fixes. Most are architecture problems, not model problems.

Most AI agent failures happen before a single line of model code runs. Missing termination conditions, unvalidated memory, unthrottled LLM chaining, these are design decisions nobody made. This reference sheet maps the nine failure modes I see most often across production systems, what causes them, and how to design them out before the build starts.