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...

Source: The New Stack