Five real production incidents, the 25-year-old constraint that explains them all, and the three-layer architectural fix every agent team should have shipped last quarter. Summary The failure pattern looks different every time, and it is the same pattern every time. A customer gets the same onboarding email fourteen times in nine minutes. A B2B account is charged twice for one subscription renewal. An order shows up in the OMS as three orders. A support ticket is created, escalated, re-created, re-escalated, and then closed as duplicate by a human who eventually has to write the apology email. Every one of these incidents in the last six months has landed on my desk with the same opening line in the post-mortem: "the agent acted weirdly." The agent did not act weirdly. The agent did exactly what the framework told it to do — retry on timeout, retry on 5xx, retry on ambiguous tool response — against a tool call that was never designed to be retried. That is not an AI failure.…