#reliability
Every post tagged "reliability".
124 posts · showing 11–20
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Your Agent Fleet Kept Its Own Quota Pinned for Forty Minutes: Synchronised Retries Are a Self-Inflicted Outage
The provider rejected one batch of calls; the fleet turned that into forty minutes of self-inflicted downtime. Why exponential backoff alone makes synchronised retries worse, the sub-second signal that exposes it, and the three-part fix that actually breaks the loop.
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The Tool Call Failed on Step 3. Retry, Skip, or Replan? Decide by What the Failure Told You About the Plan.
A failed tool call carries two facts: the action didn't happen, and something you believed may be false. Agents act on the first and throw away the second — here's the one question that sorts retry from skip from replan, and how to put the answer in the error contract instead of the prompt.
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The Refund Tool Timed Out, the Agent Retried, and the Customer Got Paid Twice. Make Every Write Tool Idempotent.
A timeout tells the agent nothing about whether the write happened, and a retry is its most reasonable next move. The fix belongs in the tool, not in the prompt.
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The Analytics Agent Said Revenue Was Up 38%. The Join Had Counted Every Order Once Per Line Item.
A text-to-SQL agent that answers with a single number has hidden the one thing a reviewer needed to see. Here is how a fan-out join slipped through, and the grain checks that would have caught it before anyone got to the slide.
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Parallel Subagents or One Agent in Sequence? Check Whether the Subtasks Share a Write
Fanning a task out to five workers looks five times faster, until two of them update the same record and the last write quietly wins. One question about shared writes settles most parallel-vs-sequential calls.
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Your Agent Works in the Demo Because You're Watching: Six Failures That Only Appear at 3 A.M.
A live demo isn't a smaller version of production — it's a different environment with a human silently patching over every gap. Here are the six failure classes that only wake up once that human goes to bed.
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The Agent Got the Right Answer by the Wrong Route. Score the Trajectory, and Know the Three Cases Where the Answer Is Enough
A final-answer eval passes an agent that guessed, one that ran a write query mid-task, and one that took forty steps to do the job in four. Here is how to assert on the path without freezing a golden trace, and when you can safely skip it.
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One Tool With Twelve Parameters or Four With Three? Let the Agent's Error Log Decide
Merging tools trades wrong-tool mistakes for wrong-argument mistakes. Your traces already show which one your agent makes more, and an overloaded tool leaves a signature you can grep for.
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An Agent That Cannot Fail Will Retry Forever. Budget Tokens and Wall-Clock, Not Retry Counts.
Your max_retries=3 never fires, because every search call succeeds. The agent just keeps finding new ways to look for an answer that doesn't exist. Here is the budget that actually stops it, and the exit that lets it stop politely.
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Retrieval Returned Zero Rows and the Agent Cited a Policy Doc Anyway
Empty retrieval results are the only tool failure that arrives as a success — status 200, results [] — and a model asked to answer from sources will invent one to fill the hole. Two boundary fixes: a loud typed empty, and citation IDs validated in code.