Your Retry Logic Is Teaching the Agent the Wrong Lesson
A tool call fails. Your agent framework retries it three times with exponential backoff. The third attempt goes through. The trace shows a green checkmark. Nobody gets paged, no error counter increments, the user gets their answer. By every dashboard you have, the system worked.
It didn't. The tool failed because the agent passed a malformed argument, and the only reason the third try succeeded is that the agent — sampling differently each time — happened to phrase the call correctly on attempt three. You didn't recover from a transient fault. You ran a slot machine until it paid out, then logged the payout and threw away the two pulls that told you the agent was broken.
This is the quiet way retry logic rots an agent system. Retries were designed for a world where the caller is correct and the network is flaky. Agents invert that assumption: the network is mostly fine, and the caller is the unreliable part. When you point a retry policy built for the first world at the second one, it stops being a recovery mechanism and becomes a way to launder bugs into green checkmarks.
