Chain Fragility Budget

Chain Fragility Budget treats reliability as a spendable resource: every agent you add to a workflow multiplies the chance of a broken handoff. If one step succeeds 95% of the time, a five-step chain lands near 77%, and a ten-step chain near 60%. Agencies selling orchestration on the promise of 40-60% timeline cuts must price that decay into the retainer before a client notices the output stopped. The practical move is to cap chain length, insert deterministic checkpoints, and reserve a monitored fallback for the two steps that touch client-facing data. Koreshield's September 2026 launch screens customer inputs, retrieved documents, and tool calls before execution, which is the shape of a checkpoint rather than a retry. AgentX ships CI/CD evaluation against test sets before deployment, so fragility gets measured before it reaches a client deliverable. Budget the failures, then sell the workflow.