#reliability
Every post tagged "reliability".
124 posts · showing 31–40
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Your Agent Retried the Tool Call. The Customer Got Charged Twice.
A timed-out tool call is not a failed one — it is an unknown one. Here is why "just retry" quietly doubles real-world side effects, and where to put the idempotency check so it cannot.
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Your Agents Asked 40 Questions This Week. Which Ones Should Have Reached a Human?
Human attention is the one resource in an agent deployment that never shows up on the bill — so agents spend it freely. Here's a three-way routing rule, a threshold you can actually tune, and the two metrics that tell you when your agent is asking too much or too little.
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Green Evals, Broken Production: The Frozen Fixture Problem
An eval suite built on recorded tool responses stops testing your agent and starts testing a museum. Here are three cheap detectors for fixture rot — and the rule for when a case should call the live tool instead.
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Who Decides the Agent Is Done? Three Stop Conditions, and Why "The Model Said So" Isn't One
Most first agents end their loop when the model stops calling tools — which means the model, not you, decides what "done" means. Here are the three stop conditions a real loop needs, and the twenty lines that turn a silent wrong answer into another iteration.
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What Should Your Agent Forget? Give Every Memory an Expiry Rule
Agent memory systems have a write verb and a recall verb, but no verb for "stop believing this." Here's how to decide at write time what makes each memory stop being true — and why expiry should downgrade a fact rather than delete it.
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The Worker Agent Reported Success. Where Should the Check Live?
A worker agent's "done" is a sentence, not evidence — and in effectful work the gap between the two is where silent failures live. Three places to put the verification, and the one most teams pick that buys nothing.
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Retry, Reroute, or Hand Back: Budgeting an Agent's Second Chances
A tool call fails and the loop tries again — five times, forty seconds, and still nothing usable for the user. Retrying is only one of three legal responses, and picking the wrong one turns a fast failure into an expensive one.
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When Memory Contradicts the Tool Call, Which One Does the Agent Believe?
An agent had the live billing data and a three-week-old memory in the same context window, and answered from the memory. The reason isn't retrieval — it's how prompts are assembled, and there are three specific fixes.
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The Tool Returned 200 and Nothing Happened
A calendar agent reported success on a meeting that landed at 3am, on the wrong calendar, with no invitation sent. The API did exactly what it was asked — and the return value gave the agent no way to know.
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Extraction Was Never the Hard Part: An Invoice Agent, Rebuilt
The first version had the model read invoices and type the numbers. The rebuild started after the numbers were already read — which is where the actual work in accounts payable has always been.