Data Bricklaying Diary

Oct 7, 2026 · Backend Development

Agent Error Recovery: Why Retries Alone Fail — Idempotency & Reconciliation

This article explains why automatic retries after agent timeouts can duplicate business actions, and details how to distinguish call failures from executed side effects, implement execution-side idempotency guarantees, reconcile using original action identifiers, and define safe recovery rules with human escalation when outcomes remain unknown.