[I Ran 5 AI Agents Unattended for 30 Days] What Actually Broke and What Held

Short summary

Running 5 AI agents unattended for 30 days revealed critical failure modes: context bloat causing silent degradation, provider throttling, auth expiry, and memory leaks. The author proposes five production-ready patterns: context rotation, exponential backoff with model failover, operator health checks, proactive token refresh, and resource thresholds. These patterns are foundational infrastructure for reliable agent deployment.

• •Context window bloat caused silent degradation without errors
• •Rate limiting, token expiry, and OOM crashes went undetected without alerting
• •Five infrastructure patterns enable reliable 30-day unattended operation

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