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.
More from coding & agent
- Warp's six non-engineering teams all run on Linear and Claude Code — mon__lim · 2026-09-11
- Is inference latency becoming the biggest bottleneck for production AI agents? — Euphoric_Sea632 · 2026-09-11
- Anthropic researcher: 99% of engineers now run swarms of 300+ self-improving agents — AlishaOutridge · 2026-09-11
- Gergely Orosz: Shipping 10x PRs With AI Agents, Sites Fill With Small Regressions — ducha_aiki · 2026-09-11
- Same Echo Maze prompt, three frontier models: all passed visually but shipped the same hidden bug — eyishazyer · 2026-09-11
- Astra storyboards plus Minimax H3 per-shot generation boost video success rates — Hailuo_AI · 2026-09-11