Everyone knows AI hallucinates. By now the pattern is familiar: the model invents a citation, fabricates a statistic, confidently names a library that doesn't exist. Teams build guardrails, deploy hallucination detectors, run retrieval-augmented pipelines. The problem is visible, measurable, and getting better every quarter.
But there are two other failure modes that cause more real-world damage, and almost nobody is building defenses against them.
Failure Mode 1: "This Is Impossible" (It Wasn't)
Last week, Linus Torvalds shared a detail from a brutal debugging session on the Linux kernel that captures the first failure mode perfectly. He was hunting a bug in the Intel Xe graphics driver on a Battlemage G21 card — a memory mismatch causing GDM display manager to restart endlessly. He used Google's Gemini as his debugging partner. It helped. It was, in his words, an "enormous" help.
But here is the part that matters: the AI "several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it."
