The Agent Timeout Your Users Learned to Game for Refunds
· 9 min read
A platform shipped a thirty-minute wall-clock cap on long-running agent tasks, paired with a refund policy that returned the token spend on any task that hit the timeout without producing a deliverable. The intent was protective: a hung agent should not bill the customer. Six months later, the timeout rate had doubled, the engineering team was deep in an "agent reliability" investigation, and the support queue was full of users complaining that the agent "keeps timing out" — with screenshots that showed the user's own browser tab closing at twenty-nine minutes and change.
The unit economics had quietly inverted on a behavioral cohort the finance model never named. The refund population was not a quality population. It was a strategy.
