Reliability

Retries, timeouts, and health checks are supposed to make systems resilient. Configured naively, they turn a recoverable blip into a self-sustaining outage. The resilience code becomes the incident.

A 10-step AI agent pipeline at 90% per-step reliability succeeds only 35% of the time. This is the compounding reliability math that explains why 78% of companies run pilots but only 14% ship agents to production — and the architecture that closes the gap.