The most dangerous failure in AI is the one you don’t measure
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Here’s something uncomfortable I’ve learned building AI agent systems:
AI rarely fails at the step we’re watching.
It fails somewhere quieter —
a retry that hides a timeout,
a queue that grows by every hour,
a memory leak that only matters at scale,
a slow drift that looks like “variation” until it’s too late.
Most teams measure accuracy.
Some measure latency.
Almost no one measures degradation.
But that’s where production breaks:
not in a single crash,
but in the compounding effects we never instrumented.
Curious to hear from PH,
What’s the smallest signal that ended up predicting your biggest AI failure?
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Replies
Triforce Todos
Measuring only accuracy is a trap. I’ve learned the hard way that tracking drift and anomaly patterns is where you actually see failures coming.
GraphBit
@abod_rehman Totally agree with you
GraphBit
@george_esther I totally agree with you but building small things can be tough to scale later. If the infrastructure supports that then everything's smooth.
For small systems, it’s not a big issue, but when you try to scale up to a larger system, optimization becomes a problem. And that only becomes apparent when the service is actually running.
GraphBit
@shyunbill Exactly , most degradation signals stay invisible until the system is under real load. Small architectures can hide inefficiencies, but at scale every retry, leak or delay compounds. That’s why continuous instrumentation becomes non negotiable once you move beyond prototypes.