The cost of finding a failure after the customer finds it

An agent’s failure isn’t expensive because it failed—it’s expensive because you found out about it from a customer complaint instead of an alert. Detection latency multiplies the cleanup cost by an order of magnitude. This post explores the arithmetic of failure-finding, why automated detection is worth the infrastructure cost, and how to choose detection strategies.

August 17, 2026 · 10 min · 2004 words · Loop & Retry