Appendix C — Anti-Patterns and Composition Examples

Anti-Pattern Registry

#	Anti-Pattern	Description	Costs	Better Alternative
A1	God Prompt	All instructions in one massive prompt	Attention dilution; maintenance nightmare	Decompose with O2/O6
A2	Over-Agentification	Agentic loops when deterministic code suffices	Cost; latency; brittleness	O2 (Prompt Chaining) or just write code
A3	Uncontrolled Recursion	Reflection/planning loops with no exit condition	Runaway cost; stuck agents	V9 (Bounded Execution)
A4	Agent Sprawl	Proliferating agents without ownership or governance	Inconsistency; undebuggable	V14 (Trajectory Logging) + V1 (H-in-the-L)
A5	Output-Only Guardrails	Safety checks only on final output	Intermediate failures propagate	V5 (Guardrail Layering) at all 4 points
A6	Vibe-Checking as Testing	Subjective assessment replacing eval frameworks	No regression detection	V15 (LLM-as-Judge) + V16 (Offline Eval)
A7	Context Hoarding	Never pruning context; dumping everything in	Token waste; attention degradation; cost	K6/K7 (Compress/Prune) or O17 (Agent Isolation)
A8	Synchronous Everything	Running independent sub-tasks sequentially	Unnecessary latency	O4 (Parallelization)
A9	Stateful Reducer	Hidden agent state not reflected in business state	Bugs; replay failure; debugging hell	V12 (Stateless Reducer) + V10 (Checkpoint)
A10	Silent Failure	Agent fails quietly; no error surfaced	Data loss; cascading failures	V1 + V14 + V10
A11	Framework Lock-in	Choosing LangChain/heavy framework first	Abstraction ceiling; debugging difficulty; cost opacity	Own your control flow
A12	Tool Proliferation	Adding tools without tool budget management	Context overflow; selection accuracy collapse	V13 (Tool Budget) + I4 (CLI first)
A13	Pilot Simplification	Clean data/sandbox in pilot; assume production is similar	88% production failure rate	Data realism in pilots; governance from day 1
A14	Trust Handoff	Agent trusts instructions from other agents without verification	Prompt injection cascading	V3 (Rule of Two) + V4 (Dual LLM)
A15	Untraced Agent	No observability; no audit trail	Debugging takes hours not minutes; no compliance	V14 (Trajectory Logging) from day 1