Retry Logic
Automatically trying a failed action again, usually with a short pause, in case it was a fluke.
Think of it like
Redialing a call that dropped — often it just goes through the second time.
Example
A rate-limited API call is retried after waiting two seconds, then four, then eight, before the agent gives up.
How it actually works
Many failures are transient — a blip, a momentary rate limit — so retrying with increasing backoff resolves them without bothering anyone. The danger is retrying things that aren’t transient (a genuinely bad request) forever, or hammering a struggling service and making it worse. Sensible retry logic caps the attempts, backs off between them, and knows which errors are worth retrying versus which are hopeless.
For product teams
Retries quietly absorb the flakiness of the real world, but blind retrying can turn a small outage into a big one.
For engineers
Re-attempt transient failures with capped, backoff-spaced retries, distinguishing retryable from terminal errors.
Related
- Tool Error Handling — The broader problem it addresses.
- Fallback Tool — What to try when retries keep failing.
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