RELIABILITY AND ERROR RECOVERY

GRACEFUL DEGRADATION Graceful degradation means reducing function rather than failing completely. Think of a car whose power steering fails. It becomes harder to turn, but you can still steer and pull over safely. It does not suddenly lock up. In an agent, graceful degradation might mean falling back to a cheaper data source, giving a shorter answer without a certain feature, using cached data with a warning, or handing over to a human. A fallback chain lists the options in order: primary source, then secondary, then a basic option, then a polite failure message. The most important principle is honest disclosure. If the agent uses a backup source, it should tell the user. Quietly using worse data without saying so is a trust violation, because the user may rely on the answer thinking it came from the best source. Graceful degradation is never an excuse to hide a problem.