RELIABILITY AND ERROR RECOVERY

BALANCING RELIABILITY AGAINST COST AND QUALITY Reliability is not free. Every retry costs tokens or time. Every fallback needs to be built and tested. Every human-escalation path needs staff. So there is a balance, and the right answer depends on stakes. For a low-stakes internal tool, such as a helper that summarizes meeting notes, a failure is a mild annoyance, so a few cheap retries are enough. For a high-stakes system, such as an agent that handles payments, a failure is serious, so it deserves more retries, extra checks, and a human fallback, even though that costs more. A useful way to decide is to ask three questions. What does a failure cost? How often does it happen? What does each extra layer of protection cost? Add protection while the expected harm prevented exceeds its price. Also remember that reliability, cost, and quality interact. Using a cheaper model may lower cost but raise error rates. Retrying until a check passes raises quality but increases cost and latency. The skill is choosing a sensible point on this triangle and writing down the reason for the choice.