Mid-level interview question
A refund call times out. What does the harness know?
Model answer
Nothing certain: the request may have been lost, may still be running, or may have succeeded with the response lost. They look identical.
Scroll sideways to see the whole diagram
Every call needs a deadline, or one stuck tool stalls the whole agent.
Text version
- Every call needs a deadline, or one stuck tool stalls the whole agent.
- But when the deadline passes, three different things might have happened.
- The harness can't tell them apart. For a read, retrying is harmless. For a write like a refund, retrying blindly can do it twice: the next pages.
For reads, retry. For writes, retry only if the operation is idempotent, or check its effect first.
Practise the rest
6 Agent failures questions, 492 in all, each with a model answer. Free.