- family
- propagation
- severity
- systemic
- triggerError
- A retrieval or context-quality failure pulls stale or wrong context into the agent stack at one layer, while every other layer remains healthy.
- mechanism
- Each subsequent layer of the agent stack executes correctly against the corrupted input: the planning layer decomposes the task using the stale context, and the tool call executes correctly against the wrong plan, so the output looks valid and nothing at any individual layer fires an alert. The failure symptom therefore surfaces at a different stack layer (typically the tool-call layer) than the root-cause layer (typically retrieval), and per-layer monitoring is structurally blind to it.
- blastRadius
- In an analysis of 73 production agent incidents (January to May 2026), 61% of multi-layer incidents had a retrieval failure at layer 2 as the upstream cause of a tool-call symptom at layer 1; every action taken on the masked output, and every operator debugging the wrong layer, is inside the radius.
- detection
- Cross-layer trace correlation that attributes tool-call symptoms back through planning to retrieval provenance; context-quality scoring at the retrieval boundary rather than only output validation; treat a rising tool-call error rate as a retrieval-layer alarm candidate, not only a schema problem.
- mitigation
- Context-quality gates between the retrieval layer and the planning layer so stale or out-of-scope context is rejected before decomposition; per-layer provenance on intermediate artifacts so symptoms are attributable upstream instead of being patched at the symptom layer.
