Failure modes

Type: kb/types/tag-readme.md

Failure-mode notes name recurring ways an agent-operated KB can fail despite having relevant artifacts on disk. Use this index when debugging why stored knowledge was not discovered, loaded, interpreted, or acted on.

Notes

• Knowledge storage does not imply contextual activation - core distinction between knowledge existing, being loaded, and actually affecting behavior
• Elicitation requires maintained question-generation systems - shows how inquiry processes decay when prompts stop generating discriminating questions

Related Tags

• LLM reliability - adjacent area: the deviation taxonomy and correction machinery for failures in how models interpret instructions and evidence
• Evaluation - methods for detecting whether failures are real and whether interventions improve behavior

Other tagged notes

• A consumption channel delivers force without the history that earned it - A consumption path can promote content into a higher-force role without checking whether an authorization covers that content, version, and use
• Abstract an experience into a lesson only when you can state where the lesson stops - Abstract an episode into a lesson only when you can state its boundary, else preserve the instance; an over-generalized lesson is one that drops the condition clause
• An LLM's generation confidence tracks typicality, not soundness - An LLM's next-token confidence measures how typical a continuation is, not whether it's true or valid; the two are decoupled, so soundness can't be read off confidence and needs a separate check
• Generality bought to avoid counterexamples is paid for in precision - Widening a claim's vocabulary to survive counterexamples raises universality by spending precision, so content stays flat — and the unreadability that follows is the symptom, not the price of rigor
• Promotion selects for unreliable activation, and the regress ends only at an external trigger - Recasts promotion from 'the consumer lacks this' to 'the consumer will not apply this unprompted', and requires delivery to have a root firing event independent of that prior activation