PAT-0360 - Propagation Amplification
A structural condition where an effect, declaration, authority, constraint, or state increases in scope or intensity as it propagates beyond declared bounds.
Primary Lenses
- LEN-0250 - Propagation Lens
Traces how structural declarations, effects, or state changes propagate across boundaries or stages.
- LEN-0190 - Escalation Gradient Lens
Measures structural growth or intensification across sequential executions, states, or transitions.
Secondary Lenses
- LEN-0290 - Variance / Entropy Lens
Measures structural variability across repeated or comparable evaluations and identifies divergence beyond expected bounds.
Primary Issue Matches
- Downstream Steps Magnify Hallucinated Claim
A hallucinated or unsupported claim from an AI output is reused by later workflow steps until it becomes more influential than the evidence supports.
- Early Model Output Gets Overweighted Downstream
An early AI output receives too much authority in later workflow steps, decisions, reviews, or generated artifacts.
- Local Exception Grows Into Policy
A local exception, special case, or one-off allowance begins to function like a general policy.
- Local Rule Spreads to Broader Cases
A rule intended for one local case, file, context, user, workflow, or exception begins affecting broader cases.
- Policy Exception Spreads Too Far
A narrow policy exception, allowance, or special case spreads beyond its intended scope and begins governing broader cases.
- Repair Step Created New Breakage
A repair, correction, retry, or fix step addresses one problem but introduces a new failure elsewhere.
- Small Change Produces Large Downstream Effects
A small prompt, schema, policy, output, or workflow change creates unexpectedly large effects in downstream steps.
- Small Error Spreads Into Large Failure
A small AI, output, routing, or workflow error propagates through later steps until it becomes a larger failure.
Supporting Issue Matches
- Action Changed Something Else Too
An AI or agent action makes the requested change but also changes another object, field, file, state, rule, or workflow element that was not supposed to change.
- Context Leaks Between Tasks
Context, assumptions, constraints, examples, files, or decisions from one task affect another task where they should not apply.
- Retry Makes the Problem Worse
A retry, repair attempt, regeneration, or follow-up instruction increases the error, expands the failure, or creates additional breakage instead of narrowing the problem.
- Review Outcome Changes Unrelated Environment
A review result, approval, rejection, or classification changes state outside the environment, case, file, or workflow it was meant to govern.
- Small Issue Keeps Escalating
A small issue, warning, uncertainty, or correction keeps increasing in severity, scope, or workflow impact across later steps.
Ontology Metadata
- Code
PAT-0360- Version
[email protected]- Ontology release
- 0.1.0
- Updated
- 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z
History
-
0.1.0 — 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z — Created
Promoted reviewed Pattern ontology entry: Propagation Amplification.
Receipt impact: None