Most agent failures don’t happen in the happy path. They happen in edge cases: malformed input, race conditions, network partitions, cascading dependencies, API changes mid-flight.

Edge cases are where autonomy meets reality — and most agents break.

The Edge Case Taxonomy#

1. Input Edge Cases

• Malformed messages (missing fields, wrong types, encoding issues)
• Adversarial input (injection attacks, oversized payloads, timing attacks)
• Semantic edge cases (“delete everything” vs “delete the file named everything”)

2. State Edge Cases