CHAPTER 13 · Reliability: Retries, Idempotency, and Failure Handling · 10 / 12
Bound the agent's own runaway behavior
Some failures come from the agent, not its dependencies. The hard iteration cap (Chapter 2) prevents an infinite tool-calling loop; repetition detection catches a stuck agent; rate limits (Chapter 11) bound abuse. These are reliability mechanisms too: they keep a confused agent from consuming unbounded resources.