Fleet Failure Modes

Incident-style catalog. Use in postmortems and pattern design.

FM-01 Shadow Agent

Signal: Production action; no registry entry.
Cause: Easy agent creation without catalog discipline.
Mitigation: F1 gate — no connectors without manifest. Weekly registry review.

FM-02 Credential Soup

Signal: Cannot answer "with what authority?"
Cause: Shared keys; mixed claw/assistant semantics.
Mitigation: Identity primitive; rotate keys per agent class.

FM-03 Inbox Bypass

Signal: Destructive action without approval record.
Cause: "Fast path" for trusted agent.
Mitigation: Tool risk ratings; destructiveHint + inbox required.

FM-04 Budget Avalanche

Signal: Monthly bill 10× with no attribution.
Cause: Multiple L2 loops + sub-agents; no caps.
Mitigation: Fleet Budget Guard before second unattended loop.

FM-05 Handoff Schema Drift

Signal: Worker agents misinterpret manager output.
Cause: Natural-language handoffs without typed contracts.
Mitigation: Hierarchical Delegation pattern; JSON schema at boundaries.

FM-06 Clone Fork Bomb

Signal: 50 variants of same agent; configs diverge.
Cause: Clone without forked_from tracking or owner.
Mitigation: Agent Clone & Fork policy; registry promotion rules.

FM-07 Audit Theater

Signal: Logs exist but cannot correlate across agents.
Cause: Per-agent logging only.
Mitigation: Cross-Agent Audit; shared trace ID on handoffs.

FM-08 Kill Switch Fail

Signal: Could not stop runaway agent in incident.
Cause: Kill procedure never tested; scattered schedulers.
Mitigation: FLEET_PAUSE_ALL + documented platform stops; quarterly drill.