#observability

Why Production AI Agents Fail: Reliability, Observability, and the Last Line of Defense

Most production AI agent failures are misdiagnosed. When an agent seems to "get dumber," it's usually configuration drift — not a weaker model — and when one deletes a database, the root cause is over-broad permissions plus no immutable backup. Using Anthropic's own 6,852-session analysis (as reported by 36Kr), an InfoQ case study on Snowflake's WORM last line of defense, and real migration data from ploy.ai, we lay out a four-layer reliability model for running agents in production.