The 40 Failure Modes Checklist: how AI products break in production

There are about 40 distinct ways an AI product breaks in production. Most teams have evals for the handful they have already been burned by.

The 40 Failure Modes Checklist is free. Six categories, from fabricated citations and retrieval misses through to irreversible agent actions, indirect prompt injection and silent model version changes. Each one comes with what it looks like in the wild and exactly what to measure for it.

Print it, mark each mode Covered, Watched or Blind, and count the Blind marks. That number is a more honest read on where you stand than any dashboard, and it takes twenty minutes.