Reliability25 May 2026

The four ways AI fails — and the cheap tricks that catch each one

Hallucination, staleness, drift, and over-agreement. Every one has a practical countermeasure.

Everything fails sometimes; AI fails in patterns. Learn the four and you'll stop being surprised.

  • Hallucination — confident, wrong. Countermeasure: for factual answers, require the agent to quote its source from your documents, and to say "I don't know" when it can't.
  • Staleness — right last quarter, wrong today. Countermeasure: date-stamp your knowledge base and review it on a calendar, not "when we remember".
  • Drift — the 100th answer is sloppier than the 1st because the conversation got long. Countermeasure: fresh session per task; long chats are for humans.
  • Over-agreement — the model goes along with a wrong premise in your question. Countermeasure: add "If my assumption is wrong, say so before answering" to your standard prompt.

None of these require a bigger model. They require process — which is free.

Nikolai Lebedovsky · AI consultant, Budapest
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