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Failure Patterns

Notes on how real systems break — and how those failures can be contained.

Most investigations start with a simple question:

What assumption is this system relying on — and what happens if it breaks?

In practice, failures usually begin with small violations of invariants:

  • hidden assumptions
  • ambiguous state transitions
  • adversarial or malformed inputs
  • edge conditions under load

This repository records those investigations.

Each note follows roughly the same structure.

The purpose is simple: document these failures so they are not repeated, and make the underlying failure modes visible before they surface as incidents.


Systems Covered

Examples come from different kinds of systems:

  • distributed infrastructure
  • cryptographic protocols
  • permission and identity systems
  • application lifecycle boundaries
  • AI model behavior and evaluation

Despite their differences, many failures follow similar structural patterns.

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Real-world investigations into how complex systems break.

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