ACI-031: Fleet Failure & Its Signals

Thesis

A fleet fails in ways a single agent cannot, and the skill that matters is detection — knowing the tell for each failure before it compounds. The encouraging finding from real operation: when the protocol forces work into the open, the signals are legible, and most failures are caught within a day.

Story

Everything that can go wrong with one agent can go wrong with a fleet — and a fleet adds failure modes of its own: two agents editing the same file, an agent that silently stops, a decision that drifts across nodes, a human who can no longer keep up. The encouraging finding from ten days of Lamplight is that there was no catastrophe. Not because nothing went wrong, but because every signal was caught within roughly a day and a half by some mechanism the protocol provides. The failures were legible because the protocol forces work into the open.