How should AI agents retry API calls? Four unresolved engineering pain points
curiousblack99 · reddit · 2026-10-16
After talking with many developers, a Redditor distilled four persistent pain points around error handling and retries when AI agents call APIs, and opened a discussion:
- Transient failures (429s, timeouts, 5xx): let the agent decide retries, or handle it in a deterministic layer beneath?
- Non-idempotent calls: how do you prevent duplicates when retrying 'create payment' or 'send email' — idempotency keys, state checks?
- Bad parameters: feed a 400 back to the model for self-correction, or fail fast?
- Partial failures in multi-step flows: roll back, resume, or escalate to a human?
The poster also asks about stacks (frameworks, retry libraries, custom layers), production incidents that changed approaches, and where agents run. A good discussion seed for agent engineering practice.
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