A Laravel AI failover can produce a surprisingly successful failure.

09:42:11 primary_provider 429 rate_limit 09:42:12 fallback_provider 200 success 09:42:12 application Missing key: recommended_action

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The primary provider was unavailable. Laravel moved the request to the backup provider, which returned a valid response.

Infrastructure saw success.

The application crashed.

The Prompt Was Pretending to Be a Contract

The agent had been instructed to return JSON:

Return JSON using this structure:

{ "risk": "low|medium|high", "recommended_action": "approve|review|reject", "reason": "string" }

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The primary model usually followed that instruction.

The fallback model returned this instead:

{ "risk_level" : "medium" , "action" : "manual_review" , "explanation" : "The account requires additional verification." }

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Nothing about that answer was nonsensical.…