They send messages, create tickets, issue refunds, make bookings, update customer records, trigger deployments, provision resources, and call tools that change external state. That creates a failure mode distributed-systems engineers already know well — but agent loops make it unusually easy to trigger: a tool call can succeed and still look like a failure to the agent.
They send messages, create tickets, issue refunds, make bookings, update customer records, trigger deployments, provision resources, and call tools that change external state.
That creates a failure mode distributed-systems engineers already know well — but agent loops make it unusually easy to trigger: a tool call can succeed and still look like a failure to the agent.
A timeout is not proof of failure A timeout describes what the caller observed.
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They send messages, create tickets, issue refunds, make bookings, update customer records, trigger deployments, provision resources, and call tools that change external state. That creates a failure mode distributed-systems engineers already know well — but agent loops make it unusually easy to trigger: a tool call can succeed and still look like a failure to the agent. A timeout is not proof of failure A timeout describes what the caller observed.
At step 6, the important question is no longer:
That distinction is where ordinary retry logic can become dangerous. It does not prove what the external provider did.
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