Section

Idempotency

Explore original reporting, analysis, product stories, and practical insights about idempotency for founders, developers, and independent builders.

2 stories

Stories and field notes

Retries are essential for unreliable APIs, but blindly repeating a side effect can create duplicate payments, messages, or records.

An agent may retry the same action after a timeout even when the external system already completed it. Idempotency prevents duplicate side effects.