# Context Failure Classifier

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- **Type:** Skill
- **Install:** `agentstack add skill-anthonyalcaraz-agentic-graph-rag-skills-context-failure-classifier`
- **Verified:** Yes — security-reviewed for prompt injection and unsafe behavior
- **Seller:** [AnthonyAlcaraz](https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/anthonyalcaraz)
- **Installs:** 0
- **Category:** [AI & ML](https://agentstack.voostack.com/c/ai-and-ml)
- **Latest version:** 0.1.0
- **License:** MIT
- **Upstream author:** [AnthonyAlcaraz](https://github.com/AnthonyAlcaraz)
- **Source:** https://github.com/AnthonyAlcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills/tree/main/skills/crisis/context-failure-classifier
- **Website:** https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/agentic-graphrag/9798341623163/

## Install

```sh
agentstack add skill-anthonyalcaraz-agentic-graph-rag-skills-context-failure-classifier
```

Requires the [AgentStack CLI](https://agentstack.voostack.com/docs/cli). Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent.

## About

# Context-Failure-Mode Classifier

## Overview

Ch1 argues the symptoms enterprises see — an agent that breaks
dependencies, forgets, reverts to dead configs, can't connect facts,
guesses the wrong API — are not independent bugs. They are the surface of
**five fatal flaws** of naive vector RAG, and at the agent level each flaw
"compounds into agent failure," "reinforcing others, creating a cascade of
agent incompetence."

This skill maps a free-text symptom to that taxonomy. It answers three
questions for each symptom:

1. **Which agent-level failure mode is this?** Action blindness, memory
   fragmentation, planning paralysis, context drift, or tool chaos.
2. **What is the architectural root cause?** One of the five fatal flaws.
3. **What cures it?** The specific graph capability (entity relationships,
   evolving memory, temporal evolution, multi-hop reasoning, tool
   orchestration).

Batch mode reads a list of symptoms (e.g. a post-mortem's bullets) and
returns a cure list ordered by how many symptoms each cure resolves —
operationalizing Ch1's claim that closing one root flaw often relieves
several symptoms because they cascade.

## When to Use

- Triaging why a deployed enterprise agent produces wrong / unsafe outputs
- Turning a post-mortem's narrative into a prioritized architecture backlog
- Deciding which graph capability to build first given observed failures
- Teaching the difference between symptom (agent behavior) and root cause
  (architecture)

Phrases: "why did my agent break dependencies", "agent forgot context",
"classify this failure", "agent reverted to old config", "agent picked the
wrong tool", "what should we fix first".

## When NOT to Use

- General software bug triage — this taxonomy only covers retrieval/context
  failures
- Model-quality complaints (hallucination from a weak model, refusals) —
  Ch1 is explicit the five flaws are architectural, not model quality
- Latency / cost / infra incidents with no context-failure behavior

## Process

| Step | Input | Action | Output | Verification |
|------|-------|--------|--------|--------------|
| 1 | one symptom sentence | `lib.classify(symptom)` | primary mode + root flaw + cure + candidates | matched signals justify the chosen mode |
| 2 | symptom with multiple signals | `lib.classify(symptom)` | `cascade_modes` populated | secondary modes surfaced (the cascade) |
| 3 | list of symptoms | `lib.classify_batch(list)` | per-symptom + aggregate | flaw counts sum to classified count |
| 4 | aggregate | read `prioritized_cures` | cures ordered by symptom coverage | top cure resolves the most symptoms |

## Rationalizations

| Agent rationalization | Documented rebuttal |
|------------------------|--------------------|
| "These are five separate bugs, fix them one at a time." | Ch1: "Each failure mode reinforces others, creating a cascade of agent incompetence." The classifier surfaces cascade_modes so you fix the shared root flaw, not five symptoms. |
| "The agent hallucinated; we need a better model." | Ch1: the flaws "cannot be addressed by optimizing search or tweaking embedding models." If the symptom matches the taxonomy, the cure is a graph capability, not a model upgrade. |
| "It picked the wrong tool because the prompt was bad." | Anthropic's failure mode (Ch1, tool chaos): bloated tool sets where "a human engineer can't definitively say which tool should be used." That is tool_chaos, cured by tool orchestration, not by prompt polishing. |
| "Just retrieve more chunks and it'll connect the facts." | Planning paralysis comes from the associativity gap — transitive relationships "simply don't exist in isolated embeddings" (Ch1, the associativity gap). More chunks don't create the missing edges. |

## Red Flags

- **A real context-failure symptom returns unclassified.** Re-state it in
  behavioral terms (what the agent *did*), not infrastructure terms; the
  classifier keys on observed behavior.
- **Everything classifies as one mode.** Either the symptoms genuinely
  share a root flaw (legitimate, check the cascade), or the symptom text is
  too generic to discriminate — add the specific wrong behavior.
- **Cure list recommends building all five capabilities at once.** Ch1's
  cascade point means start with the highest-coverage cure; building all
  five before validating one is the "three-car garage" anti-pattern.

## Non-Negotiable Verification

1. **Run the benchmark battery.** `python cli.py benchmark` must report:
   - each of the five modes classifies from its distinctive signal
   - each primary carries the correct root-flaw and cure mapping
   - an irrelevant symptom is reported unclassified, not forced
   - batch mode aggregates flaw counts and orders cures by coverage
   - every taxonomy mode maps to a known fatal flaw
2. **Verify CLI help.** `python cli.py --help` exits 0 and prints the SKILL.md description.

## Security Posture

- **Prompt injection.** Symptom sentences are untrusted free text (often pasted
  from post-mortems). The classifier only tokenizes them against a fixed signal
  vocabulary and returns taxonomy labels; instructions embedded in a symptom are
  never executed and can at most mis-classify that one symptom.
- **Data exfiltration.** No network calls, no file writes. Post-mortem text may
  contain incident details; it stays in-process and appears only in the stdout
  report the caller owns.
- **Privilege escalation.** No shell invocation, no eval, no dynamic import. The
  cure list is advisory text - it grants nothing; the humans who read the
  prioritized backlog decide what gets built.

## Source Attribution

Distilled from *Agentic GraphRAG* (O'Reilly) by Anthony Alcaraz and Sam Julien
— Ch1: The Crisis of Agentic AI, specifically the five-fatal-flaws opening
and the "Consequences for vector-based agents" section (action blindness /
memory fragmentation / planning paralysis / context drift, and the cascade
that reinforces them). Tool-chaos failure mode anchored in Anthropic's
"Effective Context Engineering for Agents"; local-vs-global query failure in
Microsoft's "From Local to Global: A GraphRAG Approach."

## Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

- **Author:** [AnthonyAlcaraz](https://github.com/AnthonyAlcaraz)
- **Source:** [AnthonyAlcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills](https://github.com/AnthonyAlcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills)
- **License:** MIT
- **Homepage:** https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/agentic-graphrag/9798341623163/

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.

## Pricing

- **Free** — Free

## Security capabilities

Automated source analysis of v0.1.0 — what this tool can access:

- **Network access:** no
- **Filesystem access:** no
- **Shell / process execution:** no
- **Environment & secrets:** no
- **Dynamic code execution:** no

*"Yes" means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it is unsafe.*


## Versions

- **0.1.0** — security scan: passed — Imported from the upstream source.

## Links

- Listing page: https://agentstack.voostack.com/l/skill-anthonyalcaraz-agentic-graph-rag-skills-context-failure-classifier
- Seller: https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/anthonyalcaraz
- Browse the marketplace: https://agentstack.voostack.com/browse

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