This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by PSBigBig
If you’re wiring LLMs, RAG, or agents into n8n, Make (Integromat), or Zapier, you’ve probably seen flows “work” and then mysteriously fall apart in production. This post is a practical catalog of failure modes and fixes you can apply today.
I maintain a public, MIT-licensed ProblemMap (16 common failure patterns with concrete remedies). It’s been battle-tested on Reddit with tons of positive feedback, and the repo has been growing fast (also starred by the creator of Tesseract.js).
ProblemMap: https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY/blob/main/ProblemMap/README.md
Who this helps
- Builders connecting LLMs/agents to n8n / Make / Zapier
- Teams adding RAG (FAISS/Pinecone/Weaviate/etc.)
- Anyone tired of “it works on my machine” pipelines
The 16 Failure Modes (mapped to automation reality)
Below are concise definitions + symptoms in n8n/Make/Zapier + guardrails you can implement quickly. Use this to spot your issue fast, then jump to the ProblemMap for step-by-step fixes.
1) Hallucination & Chunk Drift
Symptoms: RAG answers look fluent but cite irrelevant or stale chunks.
Guardrails: document freshness checks, metadata filters, retrieval sanity tests before LLM call.
2) Interpretation Collapse
Symptoms: The input is correct, but logic in subsequent nodes misreads intent.
Guardrails: schema validators, explicit intent fields, small unit prompts instead of one giant prompt.
3) Long Reasoning Chains
Symptoms: Multi-step flows degrade each hop; answers diverge.
Guardrails: critic/reviser step, max-depth caps, checkpointing intermediate facts.
4) Bluffing / Overconfidence
Symptoms: “Looks” confident, returns wrong or unverifiable claims.
Guardrails: require sources, add refusal rules, route low-confidence answers to human review.
5) Semantic ≠ Embedding
Symptoms: Good vector scores, wrong meaning (tokenizer/norm mismatch).
Guardrails: lock same tokenizer, normalization and dims for build+query; block mixed models.
6) Logic Collapse & Recovery
Symptoms: Flow passes, but a branch silently short-circuits (wrong condition order, partial data).
Guardrails: pre-flight assertions on required fields; rollback & retry policy; “must-pass” gates.
7) Memory Breaks Across Sessions
Symptoms: Agent forgets context between nodes or runs.
Guardrails: durable memory store with keys per conversation; explicit merge & TTL policies.
8) Debugging Is a Black Box
Symptoms: Unit tests call live APIs; flakey CI; non-reproducible failures.
Guardrails: mock LLM/API in unit tests; push live calls to integration tests; seed fixed local models.
9) Entropy Collapse (Prompt Injection / Jailbreaks)
Symptoms: User input alters system behavior or leaks secrets; downstream tools misfire.
Guardrails: input isolation, policy prompts, tool-call whitelists, red-team tests before release.
10) Creative Freeze
Symptoms: Model gets overly literal; zero useful synthesis.
Guardrails: diversify few-shot examples; temperature ranges with fallback.
11) Symbolic Collapse
Symptoms: Regex/DSL/code-gen steps intermittently break; small syntax changes wreck the chain.
Guardrails: strict parsers, contracts, and error-aware retries; treat code output as untrusted input.
12) Philosophical Recursion
Symptoms: Self-referential loops (“explain the plan to improve the plan…”) stall flows.
Guardrails: loop counters, termination proofs, hard caps, and periodic human breakpoints.
13) Multi-Agent Chaos
Symptoms: Agents overwrite each other’s state; handoffs are lost.
Guardrails: single source of truth, explicit ownership per phase, idempotent writes, event logs.
14) Bootstrap Ordering
Symptoms: Orchestration fires before retriever/index/cache is ready; first runs look “broken.”
Guardrails: gate first query on ready status; warm caches; purge stale indexes on swaps.
15) Deployment Deadlock
Symptoms: Circular waits (DB migrator vs. index builder vs. app), queues jam.
Guardrails: startup probes, sequential init with timeouts, health checks per dependency.
16) Pre-Deploy Collapse
Symptoms: You upload docs, immediately query, get empty/partial matches (indexing not done).
Guardrails: explicit ingestion status, “indexing…” UX state + queued question, auto-retry.
Quick Triage for n8n / Make / Zapier
- Reproduce locally with fixed seeds; mock external APIs for unit testing (No.8).
- Check readiness: is your vector store / cache warm? (No.14, No.16).
- Lock embeddings: same dims/tokenizer/norm across build+query (No.5).
- Add gates: assertions for required fields before expensive LLM calls (No.6).
- Harden prompts: input isolation & tool whitelists (No.9).
- Audit handoffs: single writer per state; append-only logs (No.13).
- Smoke tests: exact-match, paraphrase, and constraint queries before you ship.
Platform-specific tips
n8n
- Gate the first LLM node on an ingestion-ready flag (No.14/16).
- Use separate credentials for write vs read nodes to limit blast radius (No.9).
- Add a Result Check node after vector search: empty/near-zero scores trigger a fallback path (No.1/5).
Make (Integromat)
- Iterator + Array Aggregator paths: assert expected counts and types to avoid silent short-circuits (No.6/11).
- Use routers for “human-in-the-loop” on low confidence; store the verdict for reuse (No.4/10).
Zapier
- Long zaps: ensure tokens refresh mid-flow; retry on 401 with backoff (No.4/5/15).
- For web-hooks triggering RAG: queue the user’s question if indexing still running (No.16).
Example “Ready Gate” (pseudo-logic)
IF vector_index.status != "ready":
enqueue(user_query)
return "Indexing… I’ll run your question the moment it’s ready."
ELSE:
result = retrieve(user_query)
if result is empty: fallback_search()
This tiny guard removes a huge class of flaky first-run bugs (No.14/16).
Why trust this map?
- Open-source, MIT.
- Endorsed by the Tesseract.js creator.
- Proven with fast GitHub star growth and lots of real-world fixes from devs who tried it the same day on Reddit.
Again, the full reference with all 16 patterns and remedies is here:
https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY/blob/main/ProblemMap/README.md
If you want a focused checklist for your stack (n8n/Make/Zapier), ping me and tell me which symptoms you’re seeing — I’ll point you to the exact problem number and the fastest fix.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by PSBigBig