#reliability

The fix for a poison-pill row re-billing a model every sixty seconds forever was not a rewrite. It was one INT column, capped at five, incremented atomically in the database. The fix itself shipped with a gap, and that gap is the actual lesson.

The most expensive AI agent failures don't throw an error, they hide. One ran at a six-figure-a-year rate for days while every dashboard stayed green, because the signals that catch it are the ones nobody watches. The two instruments you are missing.