Equation 9 · Ten Failure Modes That Define Production AI Agent Architectures
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This is monotonically increasing in k : the same fan-out that shortens wall-clock time also raises the odds that the supervisor’s final answer was assembled from at least one silently bad branch, unless the architecture pays for verification per branch rather than once per run. A supervisor pattern that scales its parallelism without scaling its verification is not simply “faster with the same risk” — it is faster with mechanically higher aggregate exposure, and the MAST taxonomy’s separate “no or incomplete verification” and “incorrect verification” categories, together accounting for roughly 17% of coded failures, are exactly the gap between dispatching in parallel and actually checking…
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This is monotonically increasing in k : the same fan-out that shortens wall-clock time also raises the odds that the supervisor’s final answer was assembled from at least one silently bad branch, unless the architecture pays for verification per branch rather than once per run. A supervisor pattern that scales its parallelism without scaling its verification is not simply “faster with the same risk” — it is faster with mechanically higher aggregate exposure, and the MAST taxonomy’s separate “no or incomplete verification” and “incorrect verification” categories, together accounting for roughly 17% of coded failures, are exactly the gap between dispatching in parallel and actually checking what comes back [ 1 ] .
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