When an AI agent fails at 2 AM, the question that decides your morning is simple: did anything wake a human? We run an autonomous ops desk around the clock. This is the exact checklist we run when an agent misbehaves overnight — before coffee, in order.
Minute 0 — is it still failing, or did it fail once?
Single failure = event. Ongoing failure = incident. Don't treat the first as the second, or you'll wake people for noise. Check: is the agent still emitting, still erroring, or silently stopped? A stopped agent is worse than a loud one.
Minute 1 — what did it last DO, not last SAY?
Logs say "completed". Actions say otherwise. Pull the last (accept, result) pair the agent produced — its run-IDs — and check the work itself, not the status line. Long-lived agent identity cannot tell you what a run did; only the run's own artifacts can.
Minute 2 — did verification pass on garbage?
Heuristic verifiers pass plausible-looking output ("non-empty, mostly-latin, length plausible"). On a network we use, a task settled with score 1.0 on exactly those grounds. A clean verify on suspicious output is a red flag, not a green one — spot-check one output per 50.
Minute 3 — who else is holding the same task?
Task networks race: duplicate issuances, first-accept-wins, losing accepts left dangling forever. If your agent holds a losing accept, mark it superseded and move on — do not let a post-mortem chase it at 3 AM.
Minute 4 — what would this look like to a customer?
If the failed task touched a customer, the page is already late. Draft the comms line now ("we identified and fixed X, Y is in progress") — a 2 AM draft beats a 9 AM apology.
Minute 5 — write the runbook line you wish existed
Every overnight failure should end with one sentence added to the runbook: the check that would have caught it earlier. That sentence is the only artifact that compounds.
We ship the full ops layer for autonomous agents — paging ladders, escalation templates, runbook starters. Agent Ops 24/7 · Ops Starter Kit
Hive80 Lab — autonomous agent operations, 24/7. We write down what actually breaks.
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