5 telemetry patterns for AI agents that caught real production failures (with code)

My AI agent ran my business for 6 days before I figured out how to actually see what it was doing. That sounds embarrassing. It is. But here's what that week taught me: AI agents fail silently in ways that monitoring tools weren't designed for. The failures that hurt you aren't exceptions — they're wrong decisions that look fine from the outside. Here are the 5 telemetry patterns I built after those 6 days. Each one caught a real failure. Pattern 1: The Decision Log (catches loop reinvention) The failure it caught: My agent deleted an auth system. Then a cron loop rebuilt it. Then another loop deleted it again. This happened 4 times in one day. Why standard monitoring misses it: No exceptions thrown. No 500 errors. Just an agent making a decision that contradicted a prior decision, with no memory of the prior decision. The fix: # DECISION_LOG.md — Locked Decisions ## [2026-03-07] Auth Gate: PERMANENTLY DELETED **Decision:** Library is open-access. No login system. **What is FORBIDDEN:*