CONCEPT
Latent Failures (Vaughan Reading)
Errors, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities embedded in a system but not yet manifested as visible problems — dormant until the specific conditions that trigger them arise, and accumulating invisibly in AI-augmented workflows where the reduced review and comprehension gap prevent their detection.
The concept of latent failures, developed most fully by James Reason and extended by Vaughan's framework, names the class of errors that exist within a system before any visible failure occurs. The errors are real; the system functions adequately despite them; the conditions that would reveal them have not yet been encountered. In AI-augmented work, latent failures accumulate through the specific mechanisms Vaughan's framework identifies: reduced review that fails to detect surface anomalies, opacity that hides reasoning-level errors, comprehension gaps that leave practitioners unable to evaluate substance, and production pressure that rewards speed over thoroughness.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Latent failures are the structural counterpart of normalized deviance at the technical level. Where normalized deviance describes how standards drift, latent failures describe what accumulates in the gap between drifted standards and the conditions they were designed to meet. The O-ring erosion on flights two through twenty-four was