Your AI Agent Needs an Unknown State
Cover diagram by the author: a completed external effect with a lost response leaves the executor uncertain.
Your agent submits a command. The external service performs it. The response disappears somewhere between the service and your worker. A timeout handler marks the task as failed, and the agent tries again.
That retry can be the second successful execution of an operation your system believes has never happened. The model may understand the user's request perfectly. The approval may be valid. The failure sits in the executor's account of reality: it has confused a missing response with an absent effect.
For consequential tool calls, I would give the operation an explicit UNKNOWN outcome. It means execution may have happened, and another write requires evidence or a provider contract that makes repetition safe.
The state must change what the system can do next. Adding a yellow badge to the dashboard is insufficient.
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