Agent failover patterns route

Goal

Maintain workflow continuity when agent steps fail, degrade, or hit tool limits.

Readiness gate

• [ ] Critical path steps are identified.
• [ ] Failure classes are tagged (timeout, validation, dependency, policy).
• [ ] Fallback target exists for each critical class.
• [ ] Escalation SLA is documented.

Failover architecture (decision-first)

1. Detect: classify failure with structured reason code.
2. Contain: pause only affected branch, not whole workflow.
3. Fallback: route to alternate model/tool/process by policy.
4. Verify: confirm fallback output quality before resume.
5. Escalate: send deterministic failures to human queue with context packet.

Verification checklist

• [ ] Retry loops are bounded.
• [ ] Fallback does not bypass policy checks.
• [ ] Human escalation packets include input, failure class, and attempted remediations.
• [ ] Post-incident review updates failover policy.

Expected output

A failover matrix that improves recovery speed and reduces silent data or quality drift.

Monetization-fit handoff

After failover stabilization, choose tool depth by risk profile:

• low risk: batch checklist
• medium risk: deploy verify
• high risk: deploy troubleshooting

Next steps

• Continue to workflow orchestration to tighten deterministic execution.
• Continue to data pipelines for upstream/downstream contract hardening.