LLMs, GenAI, RAG, agents, evaluation · insight-1562
Treat a timed-out write as unknown and read back before retrying
- Evidence type
- practitioner heuristic
- Difficulty
- medium
- Roles
- ML engineer
- Industries
- e-commerce, aviation
Summary: situation, action, reason, boundary
Situation
A write tool, such as issuing a voucher, times out after the request left, and the agent is about to call it again.
Action
Return an explicit unknown outcome for timeouts, and have the agent or the wrapper query the system of record by a natural key to see whether the change exists before any retry or user message.
Reason
A timeout says the response was not received, not that the action did not occur.
Boundary
Side-effecting tools over networks, especially those without idempotency keys.
Symptom or risk
The first call actually succeeded, so the retry issues a second voucher, or the agent reports failure for something that happened.
Exceptions
Where the API supports idempotency keys, a keyed retry is simpler and safe.
Trade-offs
A read-back needs a lookup path and a stable natural key.
Pitfalls
Reading from a replica that lags behind the write.