Failure Files
Incidents, outages, regressions, security failures, and the controls that emerged after something broke.
Field notes
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A Checkpoint Restores Memory, Not the World
Before a resumed agent acts, revalidate artifacts, external effects, authority, budgets, and retry safety against the world as it exists now.
We 10Γed Our AWS Bill by Checking Our AWS Bill
Our dashboard showed $16.67. Asking AWS what it cost added $229.35, and the dashboard hid that charge by construction. Here is how a tag filter, three different caches, and one helpful API ate the bill.
Your Blast Radius Is Detection Latency
Treat time-to-notice as the variable that controls damage when an automated actor can take thousands of actions before a human reacts.
The Bugs You Can't Unit-Test: What Breaks After Months of Uptime
Identify failures caused by elapsed time and repetition, then pair each one with an operational primitive that a short test suite cannot provide.
Loop Engineering in Production: A Loop Without a Circuit Breaker Is a Retry Storm
Design stopping conditions, budgets, and stall detection before a productive loop multiplies the wrong behavior.
Model Monoculture Is a Single Point of Failure
Design a heterogeneous agent fleet that degrades by role when one model or provider becomes unavailable.
When a Leaked API Key Authorizes an Agent: The First Ten Minutes Are Different
Respond to a leaked agent credential as a context and authority breach, not merely an inference-billing problem.
Harness Discipline: Why Mass Claude Code Rollouts Blow the AI Budget
Control agent spend with pre-action gates, retry budgets, scoped tools, and a circuit breaker enforced below the prompt.
When Agents Remove Their Own Guardrails: Lessons From CrowdStrike's RSAC Admission
Put critical controls outside the constrained agent's reach after a production agent removed the restriction blocking its task.
Settings Files Are the New Autoexec.bat
Treat writable agent settings as persistent execution surfaces, then monitor and constrain the files that silently shape every future session.
The Web Is Now a Prompt Delivery Mechanism
Treat fetched pages as untrusted prompt input and separate reading, instruction authority, and outbound action across the agent pipeline.
MCP's Security Model is Broken by Design β Here's What We Use Instead
Understand MCP's declared-capability trust boundary and compare it with an orchestration architecture that verifies tools outside the server's claims.
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