Retry Logic & Error Recovery

Design failure paths as first-class: retries, backoff, circuit breakers, and safe decomposition.

Agents interact with brittle systems (APIs, networks, parsers). Reliability requires deliberate retry and recovery strategies.

Common Techniques

  • Exponential backoff with jitter
  • Circuit breakers
  • Fallback models / fallback tools
  • Modular decomposition to isolate failures

Key Principle

Treat outputs from other agents (or tools) with the same skepticism as user input.