“reliability”
Writing Useful HEALTHCHECK Instructions in a Dockerfile
A HEALTHCHECK that always passes is worse than none. A practitioner guide to the instruction forms, timing options and defaults, how health status reaches docker ps and Compose depends_on, and the checks that lie while your app is broken.
Timeouts and Deadlines: Human Fallback When Agents Stall
Autonomous agents hang: a tool call never returns, a loop never converges. How to set deadlines, detect stalls, and degrade gracefully to a human.
Rate-Limiting Agent Tools: 429s, Throttling, and Graceful Degradation
A 429 is the one error an agent cannot think its way out of. Where limits come from, how to honor them at the gateway with LiteLLM, and what your agent should do when the queue is full.
The Saga Pattern for Multi-Agent Transactions: Compensating Actions
Agent workflows touch payment, inventory, email, and CRM systems — and they fail halfway. Sagas give you long-running transactions with compensating actions instead of pretending rollback exists.
Startup Ordering That Actually Works: Healthchecks and depends_on in Compose
Compose depends_on only waits for containers to start, not to be ready. Gate startup on real readiness with healthchecks and condition: service_healthy — and know what that guarantee does not cover.
Kubernetes Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Probes Explained
The three probe types keep Kubernetes applications healthy — and misconfigure one and you'll restart healthy containers or starve them of traffic. Here's how each works.
Docker Restart Policies Explained: no, always, on-failure, unless-stopped
When should Docker restart your container? A practical guide to the four restart policies and how to choose the right one for each workload.
Circuit Breakers for LLM and Tool Dependencies
Apply the circuit-breaker pattern specifically to LLM providers and agent tool endpoints — failure classification, per-dependency state machines, LiteLLM gateway wiring, and fault-injection tests that prove the breaker trips when it should.
Idempotency Keys in Agent Payment Loops: Retry Without Double-Charge
The full lifecycle of a payment idempotency key inside an agentic retry loop: mint it per logical intent, persist it before the tool call, replay stored results, scope and fingerprint keys, and reconcile for double charges.
Root Cause Analysis Playbooks for Agent Failures: From Symptom to Fix
A systematic method for debugging agent failures: classify the symptom, walk a trace from the failing span upward, and apply a playbook for each failure class — routing, tool, context, hallucination, and infrastructure — with durable execution and state inspection as first-class techniques.
Error Handling for Tool Calls: Retryable vs. Fatal Errors
Classifying agent tool failures into retryable and fatal buckets — how the OpenAI Agents SDK surfaces errors to the model, configures retries, and when never to retry at all.
Chaos Testing Agent Workflows: Breaking Things on Purpose
How to apply chaos engineering to agent workflows — fault injection for model outages, tool failures, and stalls, plus the observability needed to prove resilience.
Escalation Ladders: Handing Failed Tasks to Humans with Full Context
Autonomous agents fail. Design escalation ladders that detect failure, retry intelligently, and hand work to humans with the full context needed to finish in one pass.
Idempotent Tool Design: Making Every Agent Call Safe to Repeat
Agents retry constantly, and naive tools double-charge or duplicate rows when they do. Apply Stripe-style idempotency keys, natural keys, and dedupe patterns so every tool call is safe to repeat.
Golden Trajectories: Curating Human-Approved Agent Runs
Build golden trajectory datasets by curating human-approved agent runs. Use these validated paths to fine-tune agents, create evals, and improve reliability.
Defensive AI Programming: Building Robust and Error-Resilient LLM Applications
Learn how to build production-ready LLM applications with defensive programming patterns, validation, and graceful degradation.