Taxonomy Organizes 41 AI Agent Failure Modes

// 1h agoRESEARCH PAPER

Taxonomy Organizes 41 AI Agent Failure Modes

A research paper titled "Model or Harness?" presents a framework for diagnosing AI agent errors in production environments by categorizing 41 failure modes along system interaction edges. This interaction-centric taxonomy helps engineering teams differentiate between model-level defects and harness scaffolding issues.

// ANALYSIS

Accurately localizing agent failures to either the core LLM or the surrounding harness scaffolding is one of the most critical engineering challenges in building production-grade AI agents.

–Maps 41 distinct agent failure modes directly to interaction edges between system components (e.g., model-tools, model-memory, model-user).
–Helps teams determine whether to fix issues via harness updates (scaffolding/prompts/tools) versus model improvements (post-training/model selection).
–Supports automated fault categorization using judge LLMs to evaluate and monitor production traces at scale.

// TAGS

agentfailure-taxonomyllm-engineeringagent-evaluationsystem-architectureresearch

DISCOVERED

1h ago

2026-08-03

PUBLISHED

1h ago

2026-08-03

RELEVANCE

9/ 10

AUTHOR

omarsar0

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Taxonomy Organizes 41 AI Agent Failure Modes