RELIABILITY AND ERROR RECOVERY

LEARNING GOALS By the end of this chapter you will be able to define reliability for an agent in plain terms. You will be able to use retries with backoff, detect infinite loops, and handle tool timeouts and stale data. You will understand graceful degradation and how to balance reliability against cost and quality. WHAT RELIABILITY MEANS Reliability means the agent does its job correctly and consistently, even when things go wrong. Things always go wrong eventually. Networks drop, services overload, models produce odd output, and files turn out to be missing. A reliable harness does not assume perfection. It expects failure and plans for it, the way a pilot trains for engine trouble before ever taking off. This chapter covers five themes: retry strategies and backoff, detecting and breaking infinite loops, handling tool timeouts and stale data, graceful degradation, and balancing reliability against cost and quality.