Idempotency Before Retries: Safer Tool Execution for AI Agents
A tool call can succeed even when an AI agent never receives the response. Imagine an agent that submits a refund request to a payment service. The service processes the refund, but the network connection times out before the agent receives confirmation. The agent sees an error and retries. If the second request creates another refund, a transient communication failure has become a duplicate business operation. The problem is not necessarily the model's reasoning. It is the execution boundary b…