Towards Data Science

LLM Fallbacks Break Agent Pipelines — I Built the Missing Recovery Layer

LLM rate limits don't just interrupt agent pipelines—they can silently corrupt structured outputs when fallback models receive incompatible payloads. I built a recovery layer that classifies failures, adapts payloads across model tiers, preserves execution state, and maintains schema integrity during provider swaps.

Simon Willison
2d ago

datasette-llm 0.1a10

The article announces the release of datasette-llm version 0.1a10. It reports a bug fix that corrects the demo site at agent.datasette.io, ensuring that only LLM models specified in the configuration are available. The update addresses a configuration issue affecting model availability.

Towards Data Science
Sep 1

Your JSON Is Valid but Your Data Is Wrong: Five Failure Modes LLM Structured Outputs Won't Catch

The article discusses five failure modes that can slip through constrained decoding in large language models, explaining why these errors are not detected by schema validators. It highlights that even when JSON output is syntactically valid, the underlying data can still be incorrect. The post serves as a warning that relying solely on schema validation is insufficient for ensuring correct structured outputs from LLMs.

By Mostafa Ibrahim
arXiv AI
Jul 17

StructureClaw: Traceable LLM Agents and an Executable Benchmark for Structural Engineering Workflows

arXiv:2607. 14896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Addressing a structural-engineering request requires more than a single answer; it requires a chain of interdependent artifacts: interpreted requirements, a computable model, validation records, solver outputs, code-check records, and a final report.

By Sizhong Qin, Yi Gu, Yao Jiang, Ao Cai, Changjian Zhou, Shaoxuan Shuai, Jiachang Wang, Tianhao Shen, Yueqiang Li, Xinhao Li, Li Zeng, Yueshi Chen, Dachen Gao, Genrong Xu, Wenjie Liao, Xinzheng Lu
arXiv AI
Oct 26

AgentTrace: Execution-Level Fingerprinting of Black-Box LLM Agents

AgentTrace is an active framework that fingerprints black‑box large language model agents by injecting ambiguous probes into tool interfaces, causing tokenization‑sensitive serialization failures. The initial failures separate model families, while the sequence of repair operations—modeled with lightweight Markov chains—reveals fine‑grained, model‑specific recovery behaviors. This approach achieves 96.0% attribution accuracy even under adversarial identity spoofing and can distinguish intra‑family variants that share identical tokenizers, outperforming unordered behavioral statistics and resisting prompt obfuscation and temperature scaling.

By Gejian Zhao, Hanzhou Wu, Xinpeng Zhang