6
Recovery
What to do when things go wrong.
4 patterns
6.1Beginner
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.
4 min read
6.2Beginner
Rollback Point
Commit known-good states before risky agent work so reverting is one command, not an archaeology dig through entangled changes.
4 min read
6.3Intermediate
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.
4 min read
6.4Intermediate
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.
4 min read