ai-automation-consultant / Failure Lab

Agent Context Truncation

Mid-task compaction drops a key acceptance criterion and the agent finishes the wrong work.

Category

agent-operations

Difficulty

advanced

Last Run

none

Incident Brief

Diagnose why the final result no longer matches the approved task.

Broken State

After context truncation, the agent remembers the feature but not the required e2e.

Symptoms

  • The implementation exists, but the acceptance test is missing.
  • The final response says verification was skipped without explanation.

Trace

context.summary omitted: e2e must assert denied state
final: implemented feature, tests not run

Diagnosis