73 / 108 · 03 Agentic Testing Architectures · The Dead Man's Switch Pattern← prev⊞ allnext →☰ Read as one page
10.1The Last Line of Defense
Even with all five guardrails in place, there are scenarios where the harness itself fails. The agent might hang in a system call. The harness process might segfault. A network partition might freeze the LLM call indefinitely. The Dead Man's Switch is the external safety net that kills the test run when the harness itself becomes unresponsive.