Failures are expected outcomes such as missing data, denied permission, or an unavailable service. A robust graph names them and routes to recovery, escalation, or a safe stop.

Failure Is a Designed State

In this situation—a weather tool timing out while an agent plans an outdoor event—which choice best applies “Failure Is a Designed State”?

Branches can run concurrently when they do not depend on one another's intermediate results. A join defines when enough results have arrived and how conflicts or failures are combined.

Parallelism Requires Independent Work and a Join

Retry only transient failures, add jittered backoff, cap attempts and elapsed time, and preserve the original operation identity. Permanent errors should route elsewhere immediately.

Retries Need Classification, Backoff, and Budgets

A useful criterion includes outcome quality plus constraints such as safety, cost, latency, and fairness. Optimizing one number without guardrails invites harmful shortcuts.

Success Criteria Need Measures and Guardrails

A tool interface names an operation, validates inputs, reports outputs and failures, and constrains side effects. Natural-language descriptions alone are not an execution contract.

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