· ai-devtools
AI agents need to be replaceable – without losing your work
An agent receives approval to process a partial refund.
It sends the request to a payment API, and the process crashes. Maybe the payment service completed the refund.
Maybe the request never went through. A replacement agent spins up and finds an operation record marked dispatched with no outcome written.
This kind of ambiguity isn't unique to agents. Any distributed worker crashing mid-mutation faces the same problem.
But a conventional worker resumes a predetermined workflow from the last checkpoint. An agent does something more dangerous: it reasons on its own.
Given the same customer request and no outcome record, it might come up with a different plan, pick different parameters, or decide to issue a new refund instead of continuing the one already approved. "An agent does something more dangerous: it reasons on its own."
