llm-fault-tolerance-is-multi-granular

OUT derived (depth 3)

LLM fault tolerance operates at two independent granularities: module-level fail-soft handling ensures entire operations degrade gracefully when the LLM is unavailable, while item-level batch fault isolation ensures individual failures within derive and review batches are contained without affecting other items in the same batch.

Summary

The system handles LLM failures at two separate levels that work independently. At the module level, operations like ask and derive continue running even when the LLM is unavailable, returning fallback results instead of crashing. At the item level within batch operations, if one individual proposal or review fails, the rest of the batch still processes normally. Together these mean no single LLM hiccup can take down either an entire feature or an entire batch run.

Justifications

SL — Two orphaned depth-1 beliefs capturing independent fault-isolation granularities that together provide defense-in-depth within the LLM pipeline

Antecedents (all must be IN):

  • batch-fault-isolation-is-universal-across-llm-operations — Both LLM-facing batch operations — derive proposal application (try/except per proposal with error accumulation) and belief review (silent skip on per-batch LLM failure) — isolate faults at the individual item level, preventing any single bad item from aborting the entire batch.
  • llm-integration-fails-softly-across-modules — All LLM-facing modules apply consistent fail-soft error handling: the ask module always returns a string even when the LLM is unavailable, and the derive pipeline accumulates per-proposal errors rather than raising exceptions — no LLM failure path crashes the system.

Details