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failure-recovery

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What happens when an agent fails — retry, fallback, escalate, or graceful degradation.

gemini-extension/design-agent-orchestration/skills/failure-recovery/SKILL.md

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# Failure Recovery
Agents fail. Networks time out, models hallucinate, tools error, and edge cases surprise. Failure recovery design determines whether a failure becomes a dead end or a graceful detour.
## Failure Types in Multi-Agent Systems
- **Agent failure**: A single agent crashes, times out, or produces invalid output
- **Handoff failure**: Context is lost or corrupted during transfer between agents
- **Coordination failure**: Agents conflict, deadlock, or produce inconsistent results
- **Resource failure**: External tools, APIs, or data sources are unavailable
- **Cascading failure**: One agent's failure causes downstream agents to fail
## Recovery Strategies
- **Retry**: Try the same operation again. Works for transient errors (network timeouts, rate limits). Set a retry limit to avoid infinite loops.
- **Fallback**: Switch to an alternative approach. A different agent, a simpler method, or a cached result.
- **Escalation**: Pass the problem to a more capable agent or to a human. Used when the failure is beyond the current agent's ability to resolve.
- **Graceful degradation**: Deliver a partial result rather than nothing. Tell the user what worked and what didn't.
- **Compensation**: Undo the effects of a partially completed workflow before retrying or escalating.
## Designing Recovery Paths
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