Agent Budget Exhausted Halfway Through the Task
Your agent burns its token or cost budget before finishing and leaves work half-done. Diagnose where the spend went, recover the partial work, and resume from a checkpoint.
#Agents
Articles tagged with #Agents
Restored Agent Checkpoint Is Corrupted
Your agent resumes from a checkpoint but the state is garbled, missing fields, or wrong-typed. Detect the corruption, recover from a good generation, and write crash-durable checkpoints.
Cost Tracking Misses Sub-Agent Usage
Your pipeline reports $2 but the invoice says $18. Sub-agent token usage isn't attributed to the parent run. Here's how to close the gap, verified June 2026.
Cycle in Agent Call Graph Goes Undetected
Agents hand off to each other in a loop that never terminates because nothing checks for cycles. Here is how to catch the cycle, set the right framework limit, and bound the loop for good.
Agent Handoff Loses Context Between Steps
A downstream agent re-asks answered questions or contradicts earlier decisions. Find the lossy handoff boundary and wire durable, structured state in under an hour.
Agent Orchestrator Deadlocks Waiting on Each Other
Two agents block forever waiting for each other's output. Find the cycle, add a timeout, and break the deadlock in minutes — with LangGraph, Temporal, and AutoGen specifics.
Fix: Agent Output Leaks Secrets Into Logs and Git
An AI agent wrote a real API key, token, or password into your logs, traces, or a committed file. Here is the fastest containment path, plus how to scrub output and stop it recurring.
Agent Output Not Machine-Parseable Downstream
Your agent wraps JSON in a markdown fence or adds prose, so the downstream parser crashes. Fix it for good with native structured outputs (June 2026).
Agent Skipped a Pre-flight Check It Was Supposed to Run
Your agent ran without its required pre-flight checks and failed hours later on a problem it could have caught in seconds. Here is how to make those checks a blocking gate that no code path can skip.
Agent Promotion Criteria Too Loose: Bad Output Slips Through
Your agent pipeline promotes flawed output because the quality gate is too broad or easy to satisfy. Tighten gates with critical-vs-cosmetic weighting, grounded checks, and adversarial tests without over-blocking.
Fix Prompt Template Drift Between Agent Versions
Different agent instances run subtly different system prompts, so output quality changes depending on which one handles a request. Here's how to pin prompt versions, log the exact prompt per run, and detect drift before it ships.
One Agent's Rate Limit Cascades Into a Chain Failure
One rate-limited agent stalls the whole pipeline as waiting agents time out. Isolate the bucket, decouple stages, and stop 429 cascades for good.
Flaky Tool Triggers an Agent Retry Storm
One unreliable tool call makes your agent retry hundreds of times, burning budget and tripping rate limits. Add a retry cap, backoff with jitter, 429 handling, and a circuit breaker.
Agent Skipped a Required Validation Step
Your agent pipeline promoted unvalidated output because a lint/test gate was skipped. Enforce non-skippable validation in LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, and Claude Code.
Agent State Desyncs After Restart: Detect Drift and Resync
After a crash or restart, your agent thinks the world is in a state that no longer matches reality. Here's how to detect the drift and resync reliably with LangGraph, Temporal, and custom checkpoints.
Shared Agent Memory Corrupted by Overlapping Writes
Two agents read the same shared memory, both write back, and one update silently vanishes. Diagnose the lost-update race and fix it with atomic ops, optimistic locking, or per-agent partitions.
Agent's Subprocess Orphaned After the Agent Exits
An AI agent launches a dev server or watcher, then exits without killing it. The process keeps holding a port and burning CPU. Here is how to track every subprocess and guarantee it dies.
Task Routed to the Wrong Agent: Fix Misclassified Routing
Your CrewAI, LangGraph, or AutoGen router sends tasks to the wrong specialist agent and produces garbage. Diagnose the routing logic and fix the misclassification.
Agent Trace Missing a Tool Call: Find the Gap and Fix It
Your LangSmith or Langfuse trace shows a result but no tool call span. Here's how to find which of seven causes you hit and make traces complete again.
Two Parallel Agents Edit the Same File (Lost Edits Fix)
Parallel AI agents silently overwrite each other's edits to a shared file. The fastest fix in June 2026 is worktree isolation. Here's how to detect, fix, and prevent lost writes.
Multi-Agent Handoff Prompts for Claude Code Subagents
12 prompt templates to hand work between Claude Code subagents — research, plan, implement, review, ship — without losing context. Updated for June 2026.