Find the 6 failure patterns killing your AI agents in production

Your AI looked great in the demo. In production, it's giving wrong answers, burning tokens, and eroding trust. We find exactly why — and hand you the fix list.

3+ production issues found or you don't pay

If you've lost money on AI, it wasn't the model's fault.

90%

of "AI agents" are deterministic workflows in disguise — burning tokens on reasoning that should be an if/else statement.

147K

tokens is where context actually degrades — not the 200K on the box. Your AI is losing data before hitting the limit.

40x

cost difference between running every subagent on Opus vs. right-sizing to Haiku. Most teams use the expensive model for everything.

0

errors logged when tool descriptions silently misroute calls. No alerts. No logs. Just wrong answers with total confidence.

After the diagnostic

Before

  • Wrong answers you can't diagnose
  • $47K/month in token spend, unclear ROI
  • 4 "agents" that should be workflows
  • AI evaluating its own output
  • Users losing trust, silently

After

  • Prioritized fix list, ordered by impact
  • 60% cost reduction from model right-sizing
  • Agent-vs-workflow map for every automation
  • External evaluation pipeline
  • 12-point production readiness scorecard

Fixed scope. Fixed price. Written report.

Not hourly consulting. A defined engagement with a concrete deliverable and a personal guarantee.

Quick Scan

$2,500
3-5 days · 1 focus area
  • Deep-dive on one system: agent architecture, context flow, or tool routing
  • Written report with prioritized fixes
  • 1-hour walkthrough call
  • 3+ issues found or you don't pay
Get started

Ongoing Advisory

$7,500/mo
Fractional AI advisor · Month-to-month
  • Everything in Full Diagnostic
  • Weekly strategy call
  • Slack access for async questions
  • Architecture review for new features
  • Team training & code review
  • Quarterly production readiness re-score
Get started

What the diagnostic looks like in practice

Case Study — Series B AI Platform

4 engineers. 8 months of development. A multi-agent system that "worked great in staging." In production: dropping order numbers during context summarization, looping on conflicting instructions, approving its own broken output, burning $47K/month in tokens because every subagent ran on the most expensive model.

The fix wasn't a rewrite. It was structural: replaced 3 autonomous agents with deterministic workflows (they never needed reasoning), added a sprint system to prevent context rot, separated builder from evaluator, right-sized model selection per task.

60%
Cost reduction
3 agents
Replaced with workflows
2 weeks
Time to fix list

The 6 failure patterns we diagnose

1

Agent Architecture Failures

Agents parsing natural language for completion instead of stop_reason. Subagents assuming shared memory. Self-evaluation bias — the builder grading its own homework.

2

Context Rot

Progressive summarization destroying dollar amounts and order numbers. Lost-in-the-middle effect burying critical instructions. Memory contradictions.

3

Tool & MCP Misconfigurations

Tool descriptions causing silent misroutes. More than 4-5 tools per agent degrading selection. No distinction between "nothing found" and "the API failed."

4

Semantic Layer Gaps

"Revenue" means 3 different things across 3 teams. The AI picks a table and gives confident, plausible, wrong answers.

5

Token Waste

Full file reads at 3,000 tokens when grep costs 200. MCP servers consuming 2,000-8,000 tokens before any work starts. No batch API usage.

6

Production Readiness Gaps

No structured logs. Same config for dev and prod. Silent catch blocks. Sentiment-based escalation. No session handoff artifacts.

Questions I get asked

How is this different from hiring a consultant?

Consultants bill hours. This is a fixed-scope engagement: defined deliverable, defined price, defined timeline. You get a written report with a prioritized fix list — not a slide deck, not an ongoing retainer you can't exit. If I don't find 3+ issues, you pay nothing.

What access do you need?

Read access to your AI-related code repositories, architecture docs (if they exist), and logging/monitoring dashboards. I don't need production credentials or customer data. Most teams grant a short-lived GitHub collaborator invite and a Datadog/Grafana viewer role.

What if you don't find anything?

Then you don't pay. That's the guarantee. I've never had to honor it — every engagement so far has found more than 3 production-impacting issues. The structural failures are that common.

We already have an internal AI team. Why do we need this?

Your internal team built the system. That's exactly why they can't objectively diagnose it. The same session that wrote the code can't evaluate the code — that's one of the 6 failure patterns. An external diagnostic gives your team the prioritized fix list without the sunk-cost bias.

What's the ROI?

The average full diagnostic finds 60% token waste and 3+ silent failure modes. A $15K diagnostic on a $47K/month AI spend typically pays for itself in the first month. The Quick Scan at $2,500 is designed to be a no-brainer for any team spending $5K+/month on AI.

Who actually does the work?

I do. Kevin Luddy. This isn't a firm that sells and delegates. One person does the diagnostic, writes the report, and walks you through the findings. That's why I limit slots.

What we believe (that most vendors won't say)

"A smarter model doesn't fix agent failures. A smarter environment does."

Model upgrades are the most expensive way to avoid fixing your architecture.

"90% of automation needs are workflows, not agents."

If you can draw the decision tree, you don't need AI. You need an if/else statement that costs nothing.

"Agents cannot reliably judge their own output."

Confirmation bias with a GPU is not evaluation.

"More data degrades AI performance when context isn't managed."

Past a threshold, more information makes it worse, not smarter.

Taking 3 new diagnostic clients this month

Talk to Kevin

Tell me what you're running and what's not working. I'll respond within 24 hours.

No spam. No sales sequences. Just a direct reply from me.