Base120 · Inversion
Failure First Design
Begin planning by identifying all possible failure modes and designing to prevent them
When to use
"Use when designing safety-critical or high-reliability systems. Begin by identifying all possible failure modes, then design to prevent or mitigate each. Inverts the normal design sequence (start with success, handle failure later)."
Example
"Designing an AI agent that can send emails. Failure modes — sends to wrong recipient, sends sensitive data, sends at wrong time, sends too many, sends malformed content. Designing for each — recipient confirmation, content scanning, rate limiting, format validation."
Common misuse
"Identifying failure modes but not designing mitigations. A failure mode list without corresponding design changes is documentation of risk, not management of it."