Reading a Faultmap: mapped safe, structural risk, likely break

How to read the three verdicts, and what to do with each before you write a line of code.

Balagei G Nagarajan4 min read

A Faultmap marks every step the agent takes with one of three verdicts. Reading them takes about a minute, and each one tells you what to do next.

1. Mapped Safe

The step is sound as designed. Read-only access on scoped fields, a call with a guard already around it. Leave it. Most steps land here, and that is the point: the map shows you where not to spend.

2. Structural Risk

The step works in the happy path but has a fault waiting under load or drift. A write that assumes a stable schema, a context pass that could carry private data. Add the contract or the guard now, in the design.

3. Likely Break

The step will fail as designed. An uncapped retry, a deadlock past a turn threshold. This is the work. Fix these before you build, and the first test suite is already written for you.

Read top to bottom, fix the breaks, harden the risks, ship to pass. That is the loop.


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Every article here documents a failure mode we've seen in production. Faultmap finds them before you ship.