Reddit keeps screaming that “AI agents are broken.”

In this episode, Maya walks through three failure modes that show up again and again when teams ship agents into real workflows:

The retry storm – everyone adds retries to “make it reliable”, and quietly creates a self‑inflicted DDoS and a runaway LLM bill.

The memory leak – agents get “long‑term memory” with no hard boundaries, and start mixing one customer’s context into another.

The decision nobody logged – agents influence real outcomes, but the reasoning lives in a layer with zero logging, so nobody can explain what happened later.

These aren’t exotic edge cases. They’re how AI agents actually fail in clinics, banks, law firms, and enterprise ops when nobody plans for retries, memory boundaries, or decision logging.

Keywords: AI agents, agentic AI, AI failure modes, AI in production, AI reliability, retry storms, AI memory leaks, AI decision logging, AI orchestration, AI infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, CTO, VP Engineering

This is Maya. New episodes three times a week.

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