Graceful Failure

What it is

Graceful failure means an agent handles errors without causing damage. Instead of crashing or making things worse, it recognises the problem, stops or reverses partial work, preserves state, and reports what happened. Graceful failure limits the blast radius of errors.

Why it matters

Agents will fail—that's unavoidable. How they fail matters enormously. An agent that fails gracefully is safe to run; one that corrupts data or cascades errors is dangerous. Evaluating how agents handle failures is as important as evaluating their success cases.