Devops PROMPT

Agent Failure Post-Mortem

July 26, 2026Optimized for: anyDebugging agent failures

Prompt

An agent run failed. Diagnose it properly rather than guessing.

Work through, in order:

1. WHERE IT WENT WRONG: the first turn where the agent's state diverged from correct. Not where it crashed, where it started being wrong.
2. CLASSIFY THE FAILURE:
   - Goal drift (lost track of the objective)
   - Context loss (needed information had fallen out of the window)
   - Tool misuse (wrong tool, or right tool wrong arguments)
   - Bad tool output handling (misread a result)
   - Hallucinated state (believed something it never verified)
   - Loop (repeating without progress)
   - Genuine capability limit
3. ROOT CAUSE: harness, prompt, tool design, or model. Be specific about which.
4. WHY IT WAS NOT CAUGHT: what check would have surfaced this at turn N instead of turn N+20?
5. THE FIX, and whether it is a prompt change, a tool change or a harness change.

Run transcript:
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Tags

Post-mortem template that separates where an agent crashed from where it actually started being wrong, which are rarely the same turn.

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