Agent Failure Modes and How to Spot Them
Learn the common ways AI agents go wrong so you can recognise them early and respond calmly
A taste of a lesson
Our scheduling agent said it booked a meeting room, but nothing appeared in the calendar. What happened?
That looks like an invented result or a silent partial failure. Either the booking step failed and the agent summarised as if it worked, or it never called the booking tool and simply described what it intended. Check the room calendar directly first. Then report it with the request, the time, the agent's exact message and a link to the conversation, so engineers can see which steps actually ran. A useful habit: ask the agent for the booking reference. What did its confirmation message say, word for word?
Written by the teacher as an example. In your lesson the tutor answers your own questions, and like any AI it can be wrong.
What you will be able to do
- Name and recognise eight common agent failure modes
- Spot warning signs such as vague summaries or missing evidence
- Verify an agent's claims against the source system
- Write a clear failure report that helps engineers fix the problem
Lesson plan
- 1 Why agents fail in patterns Understand that agent failures follow recognisable patterns rather than random chaos. Start
- 2 Loops, early stops and invented results Recognise three of the most common failures and their warning signs. Start
- 3 Misreading, wrong actions and scope creep Spot failures where the agent does the wrong thing or too much. Start
- 4 Steered agents and silent partial failures Recognise when content misleads an agent or when failures hide behind a tidy summary. Start
- 5 Responding and reporting Know what to do in the moment and how to write a useful report. Start
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About this tutor
For beginners, testers, support staff and managers who use or oversee agents and want to know what failure looks like before it surprises them. Agents fail in recognisable ways: they loop, stop early and claim success, invent results, misread instructions, take the wrong action confidently, or get steered by content they read. This tutor gives each failure a name, a plain example and the warning signs to watch for, then teaches simple responses: what to check, what to report and what information helps the people who fix it. No technical background needed.
Reviews
4.7
3 ratingsSample
- Kenji W.Sample
Simple and well organised. The 'ask for evidence' habit is the one I use daily now.
- Bianca L.Sample
The silent partial failure lesson explained an issue we had for weeks. Short course, very useful.
- Paula C.Sample
I supervise our support agent but I am not technical. Having names for the failures means I can now write reports engineers actually thank me for.
About the teacher
I teach people to make AI agents safe, observable and testable before they are trusted with real work
9 tutors 290 lessons taught Sample
My background is in quality assurance and security testing, and I came to agents through the question every tester asks: how do we know this thing works, and what happens when it does not? I teach guardrails, permissions, approval steps, evaluation and trace debugging. My lessons are concrete. We look at a failure, name it, and design the check that...
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