6
Recovery
What to do when things go wrong.
4 patterns
6.1
Clean Slate
When the context is poisoned and the agent is looping, discard the conversation and restart from a tight written brief instead of arguing the agent out of its own history.
Beginner4 min read
6.2
Rollback Point
Commit known-good states before risky agent work so reverting is one command, not an archaeology dig through entangled changes.
Beginner4 min read
6.3
Reproduction First
When fixes keep missing, stop requesting fixes and require a deterministic reproduction first — an agent patching a bug it cannot reproduce is guessing.
Intermediate4 min read
6.4
Postmortem Note
After a recovery, encode the root cause into the persistent layer — a convention, a memory, a test — so the same failure cannot recur instead of recurring every session.
Intermediate4 min read