AI agents often rely on external tools/APIs. How would you design a system that ensures robustness when these dependencies are unreliable or slow?

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Treat external tools as unreliable dependencies by enforcing timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, and isolation across tool categories to prevent systemic impact. To avoid poor decisions, I’d validate outputs against schemas, track data freshness, and allow the agent to reason explicitly about uncertainty or degraded tool responses.

AI agents often rely on external tools/APIs. How would you design a system that ensures robustness when these dependencies are unreliable or slow?

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