News Briefing

<p>The agent was asked to make a flaky outbound POST reliable, so it added an automatic retry on timeout: wait, re-send, stop after three attempts. The test suite mocked the server as always failing on the first call, passed the retry on the second, and reported green. In production the first POST had actually committed while the client was still waiting on a slow response, and the retry wrote a second record.</p> <p>The core mistake is treating a timeout as proof that nothing happened. A timeo