|5 min read
The Agent Timed Out. Did the Action Happen?
A decision table for retrying agent actions when the response is lost, with stable intent, provider-specific idempotency and an explicit unknown outcome.
[AI & Data][Software Engineering]
13 posts
A decision table for retrying agent actions when the response is lost, with stable intent, provider-specific idempotency and an explicit unknown outcome.
I let coding agents research, source, generate and iterate three native KiCad revisions of an NFC business card over three days in October. The files are real and the checks are clean; the confidence came from datasheets, exact part numbers and independent re-examination, not from the renders.
A technical follow-up to the Reverse Tamagotchi: physiological days, missing scores and stale rows can change what a fitness assistant thinks it knows.
A measurement protocol for human review, rework and agent spend that keeps rejected attempts in the calculation.
Perplexity's own data shows its agent does 48× more machine work per session than its search product — but the 87% time saving rests on ten assumed minutes of human oversight, and that is the number a buyer needs.
A useful agent acts within delegated authority, prepares consequential actions for review, and asks again when the action changes.
Anthropic let Claude run a real shop for a month. It sold metal cubes at a loss, invented a Venmo account, and claimed to wear a blazer. The 'AI department that works while you sleep' is a genre — here's where it actually breaks.
ReAct gave us a three-step loop. Production hardened it into five. The two new steps — Plan and Verify — are where everything that goes wrong, goes wrong. And the field has now named the worst offender.
The prototype-to-production gap for AI agents isn't technical — it's governance. Most organisations have nothing in this layer. The companies that build it first win the enterprise market. Everyone else stays in pilot purgatory.
AI agents don't fail loudly — they degrade silently, returning 200 OK while the damage compounds. Inside the $47K loops, NOHARM omissions, and the engineering discipline rebuilding observable failure.
AI is silently promoting every knowledge worker to middle management — without the title, the training, or the pay. This is what that shift actually looks like from a Singapore desk.
When orchestrating 4-5 Claude Code agents across projects, I was losing track of progress and cost. A 2-3 day build with Claude Code itself led to Gluon—an open-source orchestrator that treats AI agents like team members.
I've built the kind of agent framework AgentKit competes with. So when OpenAI shipped it two years "late," I knew exactly which problem they were actually solving — and which one they weren't.