#reliability
Every post tagged "reliability".
124 posts · showing 21–30
-
A Second Pass That Asks the Same Question Finds the Same Bugs. Change the Unit, Not the Temperature.
Raising the temperature on a review pass re-rolls the dice inside a frame that has already decided what is findable. Three properties determine what a pass can see, and a real second pass has to change at least two of them.
-
A 1% Flaky Tool Shouldn't Take You Down. Three Nested Retry Layers Will.
A tool that fails one call in a hundred is healthy. The retry logic wrapped around it is what turns a dependency's bad minute into a queue of hung user requests — and the load multiplier is at its worst exactly when the dependency is weakest.
-
A Two-Line Prompt Diff Is a Behavior Change. Here's the Regression Check It Needs.
A prompt edit has the blast radius of a code change and none of the safety rails — no compiler, no type error, no failing test. Six checks that turn a forty-second approval into a real regression gate.
-
A 5% Canary Mostly Samples Your Easy Tasks. Roll Agent Upgrades Out by Task Class.
Random traffic slices sample volume, but an agent's risk lives in the thin tail of long, tool-heavy, irreversible tasks. Here's how to build a rollout ladder that samples the danger instead.
-
"Done" Is Not a Handback: What a Worker Agent Should Actually Return to Its Supervisor
A worker agent reporting "completed" tells its supervisor nothing it can verify. Here is the handback shape that makes a fabricated result catchable by code instead of by a second model's opinion.
-
One 300-Second Timeout Tells You Nothing. Agents Need a Deadline Budget.
A run that dies at its ceiling with no attribution tells you nothing about which part was slow — and pushes you toward the laziest fix, raising the ceiling. Three nested clocks, an inherited remainder, and a reserved tail slice turn timeouts into a signal you can actually read.
-
Append or Supersede? What to Do When New Information Contradicts Agent Memory
Most agent memory systems only know how to add. The moment a fact changes, the store holds both versions and the retriever picks whichever one scores higher — which is why a scheduling agent keeps booking a room that was decommissioned last month.
-
Retry, Repair, or Replan? A Recovery Ladder for When an Agent's Step Fails
Blind retry burns money on a call that will never succeed; premature replanning throws away correct work and produces a worse plan. The deciding signal isn't how bad the error looks — it's what the error proves false.
-
Your Eval Ran Each Case Once. That's Why It Missed the Flake.
A forty-case suite can pass every case and still hide a bug that reaches users one week in five. The number missing from most agent evals isn't coverage — it's how many times you ran each case.
-
Your Two Reviewer Agents Disagree. Who Breaks the Tie?
Running the same document past two agents is easy. Deciding what happens when they return opposite verdicts is the part most multi-agent designs quietly leave undefined — and the default resolution is usually the worst one available.