Silent Failure

Silent failure is more dangerous than an error because it consumes the reviewer's trust. In AI systems it takes several forms: a governance rule that was never loaded, a retrieval that returned nothing and produced a confident answer anyway, a redaction rule that matched no records because its pattern was wrong, or a scheduled index run that completed without processing anything. Each reports success. The defence is verification that measures effect rather than completion — counting records changed rather than trusting a status, and comparing expected against actual.

The Interaction Log records what was actually assembled for each execution, including which skills loaded, so a governance rule that failed to apply is visible as an absence rather than inferred from output. Reporting over the vector index and the logging tables makes the difference between a run that completed and a run that changed something measurable.