Your agent fails 5% of the time mid-workflow, after executing real side effects. Make it safe.
The question that separates demo-builders from production engineers. Idempotency keys, the saga pattern, dry-run modes, approval tiers: the distributed-systems toolkit applied to agents, with the trap most answers miss.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The question that separates demo-builders from production engineers. Idempotency keys, the saga pattern, dry-run modes, approval tiers: the distributed-systems toolkit applied to agents, with the trap most answers miss.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
