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.

What This Looks Like

The user retries, regenerates, asks for a fix, or gives a corrective follow-up, but the result gets worse. The system may introduce new errors, lose parts that were previously correct, expand the task, change unrelated content, or create a larger failure while attempting to repair a smaller one.

Why It Matters

Retries are often treated as a safe recovery path. When retry makes the problem worse, the user loses confidence that the system can converge. The workflow may shift from solving the original issue to managing the side effects of repeated repair attempts.

Structural Signal

A corrective action increases the failure surface instead of reducing it. The issue is not only that the retry failed; it is that the retry changed, expanded, or propagated the problem beyond the original error.

Common Triggers

The repair prompt does not isolate what must remain unchanged
The model rewrites the whole answer instead of patching the failed part
A correction introduces new assumptions or new scope
The system treats retry as permission to reinterpret the task
Earlier errors are carried forward and amplified
The workflow lacks a stop condition or comparison against the prior good state

When to Use This Issue

Use this Issue when the user’s attempted fix, retry, regeneration, or follow-up creates additional damage or expands the failure beyond the original problem.

When Not to Use This Issue

Do not use this Issue when retry simply produces another bad answer of the same kind, or when the user intentionally changes the task. Use this Issue when the retry makes the failure larger, messier, or harder to recover from.

Primary Pattern

PAT-0300 — Escalation Growth

Declared Patterns

PAT-0300 — Escalation Growth
A structural condition where impact, authority, scope, or consequence increases across sequential states without a declared limiting mechanism.
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.
PAT-0380 — Silent Mutation
A structural condition where a change occurs without a corresponding declared update, authority update, or version change.

Derived Primary Lenses

LEN-0180 — Determinism Lens
Evaluates whether identical structural inputs produce equivalent structural outputs across repeated executions.
LEN-0190 — Escalation Gradient Lens
Measures structural growth or intensification across sequential executions, states, or transitions.
LEN-0250 — Propagation Lens
Traces how structural declarations, effects, or state changes propagate across boundaries or stages.
LEN-0280 — Reference Stability Lens
Evaluates whether structural references, identifiers, nodes, and edges remain consistent across execution cycles or comparable states.
LEN-0290 — Variance / Entropy Lens
Measures structural variability across repeated or comparable evaluations and identifies divergence beyond expected bounds.

Derived Secondary Lenses

LEN-0260 — Provenance Trace Lens
Attaches stable lineage to structural regions by mapping origin, reference history, and transformation path.

Search Intents

retry makes the problem worse
AI gets worse after retry
regeneration created more errors
fix attempt broke more things
retry expanded the problem
AI repair made new mistakes

Ontology Metadata

Code: ISS-0007
Version: ISS-0007@0.1.0
Ontology release: 0.1.0
Updated: 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z

History

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