FAILURE LABS
Break it on purpose
Failure Labs are the spine of Course 001. Every lab has five artifacts:
fault profile expected invariant reproduction command observable symptoms automated pass/fail check
A lab does not pass because the run eventually finished. A lab passes only when the relevant invariant is directly checked.
Lab catalog
| Lab | Failure | Primitive learned | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Kill the Agent | state must survive | coming |
| 02 | False Completion | evidence-backed progress | coming |
| 03 | Pull the Plug | checkpoint + replay semantics | coming |
| 04 | Duplicate Report | idempotency + reconciliation | coming |
| 05 | Two Workers, One Run | leases + ownership | coming |
| 06 | Failure Matrix | failure-specific routing | coming |
| 07 | Three-Hour Approval | durable human waits | coming |
| 08 | Context Rot | reconstructed working context | coming |
| 09 | Silent Run | progress-aware observability | coming |
| 10 | Hostile Vendor | trust boundaries + permissions | coming |
| 11 | The Judge That Agreed With Everyone | validated evals | coming |
| 12 | Replace the Harness | framework portability | coming |
| 13 | The Redeploy | automatic recovery | coming |
| 14 | All of them, at once | system-level reliability | coming |
Lab numbers run 01 to 14, independent of module numbers: Modules 00 and 13 carry written exercises instead of a lab (the twelve-scenario classification and the case-study extraction).
The standard lab page
Every lab follows the same shape, and each part earns its place:
- Failure
- One sentence describing what is intentionally broken.
- Prediction
- Before running it, you write down what you think will happen.
- Reproduce
- One command:
make lab LAB=05. No setup reconstructed from prose. - Observe
- Where to look, not what the answer is: the dashboard,
run_events, the trace, the runs table, the external side-effect table. - Diagnose
- Questions that force mechanism-level thinking.
- Fix
- The invariant is stated; the implementation is yours.
- Prove
- A deterministic test or a measured comparison.
- Production extension
- What the course implementation simplifies, stated plainly.
Run the fixture server
git clone https://github.com/ogkranthi/air-course-long cd air-course-long && make fixtures # deterministic vendor sites on :8001
A failure course becomes weak when every student sees a different website, latency profile, or model behavior. Environmental faults stay deterministic; model-semantic behavior can still vary, so the model and prompt versions are recorded with every run so results can be compared.