Resuming After a Budget Stop: What 36 Enumerated Stop Points Taught Me
A budget cap that halts a headless run is neither success nor failure. I enumerated every stop point, measured resume integrity and total spend, and ended up changing what the cap applies to.
Did That Post Actually Go Through? Safely Retrying an Interrupted MCP Write Without Double-Executing
When an MCP write tool call is interrupted by a dropped connection, you can't tell whether the server ran it. Here's why naive retries cause double-execution, and a working wrapper that uses idempotency keys and a reconcile read to retry safely — with examples from an unattended pipeline.
When Your Cowork × GitHub MCP Triage Quietly Drifts Each Run — Field Notes on Idempotency and Label Boundaries
Cowork + GitHub MCP issue triage looks perfect on the first run, then quietly breaks when left unattended: duplicate comments, reclassification churn, rate exhaustion. Field notes on idempotent prompts, label-boundary self-audits, and request budgets that keep weekly triage stable.
I Watched an Agent Try to Fix a File It Had Already Fixed — Stale Shallow Clones and Refreshing Before You Decide
An unattended agent tried to re-fix a file it had already fixed. The cause was a days-old shallow clone it kept reading. Here is how to detect that staleness numerically and re-clone only before decisions.
An Unattended Agent That Wakes Up to a Blank Machine Every Time
A scheduled, unattended agent wakes up on a fresh disposable machine every run: paths it cannot write to, a filesystem that has not finished booting, a working directory that has vanished. Here is how to design state recovery into the first thirty seconds, drawn from real operational logs.
Making Claude Agent SDK Tools Idempotent — Stopping Double Execution with Deterministic Keys and an Outbox
An implementation log for stopping a Claude Agent SDK retry or session resume from processing the same payment twice. Three patterns — deterministic idempotency keys, an outbox, and a lightweight wrapper — with runnable code and production metrics.
Implementing the Saga Pattern in Claude Agent SDK — Compensating Transactions and Idempotency
A practical guide to building safe multi-step Claude Agent SDK workflows. We cover compensating transactions, idempotency keys, and partial-failure state recovery, all from patterns that have run in production.
Claude API Webhooks & Async Processing: Error Patterns and Recovery Strategies
A practical guide to handling errors when integrating Claude API with webhooks and async pipelines. Covers timeouts, duplicate processing, idempotency, dead-letter queues, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation with full Python examples.