Agents: Stop Hallucinating Exactly-Once Execution
benyounesarabah · reddit · 2026-07-13
The author points out that "exactly-once execution" is a myth in distributed systems, and the agent stack shouldn't treat it as a realistic guarantee.
A more practical approach includes:
- Accepting at-least-once delivery
- Making external side effects idempotent
- Attaching an idempotency key to every external call
- Deduplicating on the receiving end and skipping completed steps during replays
The conclusion: don't try to eliminate duplicate calls; design them to be harmless.
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