When an agent's write call times out, how do you know it actually happened?
No-Age-3362 · reddit · 2026-10-05
A Reddit thread highlights the most underhandled case in agent setups: a write tool call (send email, post refund, change a record) times out and nobody knows whether it actually landed — while most agent loops default to retrying, which is fine for reads and risky for writes.
Three options, each with limits: (1) idempotency keys generated before the call and reused on retry, but many downstream APIs don't support them; (2) read back after any timeout to check the effect before deciding, which requires a reliable lookup; (3) treat timed-out writes as unknown and hand them to a human, which doesn't scale. The author asks how others handle APIs with no idempotency support.
Related event: Developers debate how to handle lost MCP tool-call results(2 posts)→
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