How agents fail, and guardrails

After this lesson you can: Predict the common failure modes and bound them before shipping.

First: The agent loop

Watch

• Why Agentic AI Fails: Infinite Loops, Planning Errors, and More - IBM Technology, 13 min. Directly targets agent failure modes and guardrail thinking at the right conceptual depth and length.

Notes

An agent is not just a model call; it is a loop that observes, decides, acts, and observes again. That loop is powerful because it can recover from missing information, use tools, and break work into steps. It is also dangerous because every turn creates another chance to misunderstand the goal, call the wrong tool, repeat itself, spend money, or modify state incorrectly. A demo often exercises the happy path once; production exercises the loop thousands of times under messy inputs, partial failures, and ambiguous instructions.

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