AI Engineering/Phase 14/Lesson 26

Failure Modes: Why Agents Break

MASFT (Berkeley, 2025) catalogs 14 multi-agent failure modes in 3 categories. Microsoft's Taxonomy documents how existing AI failures amplify in agentic settings. Industry field data converges on five recurring modes: hallucinated actions, scope creep, cascading errors, context loss, tool misuse.

Learn + Build 1 hr Python (stdlib)

Prerequisites: Phase 14 · 05 (Self-Refine and CRITIC), Phase 14 · 24 (Observability)

#Learning Objectives

Name MASFT's three failure categories and at least four specific modes in each.
Explain why agentic failure amplifies existing AI failure modes (bias, hallucination).
Describe the five industry-recurring modes and their mitigations.
Implement a stdlib detector that tags agent traces with failure-mode labels.

Full Access lesson

Keep going. The rest of this lesson is one step away.

Unlock all 503 lessons, video, code, quizzes and every future update. Pay in your own currency with Paystack.

See plans Sign in

The text and code of this lesson are based on AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare, MIT licensed.