Why AI agents need disciplined error handling before acting in production

AI agents that take real actions, such as calling tools or sending messages, can turn one early mistake into a chain of wrong steps, unlike chatbots that only produce a bad paragraph. The guidance advises treating failures differently: retrying transient issues like timeouts, feeding fixable errors back to the model, and pausing for human input when needed. Silent degradation is especially risky, so it recommends structured tool results, schema validation, and full tracing to detect problems. Retries and repair loops should be capped with exponential backoff, since unbounded retries waste resources and can repeat side effects like double payments. Escalation to a person is framed as a trust boundary, especially for irreversible or high-stakes actions, with reversibility as the guiding principle.