Reliability

A tool schema is a contract with a caller that guesses. This is a concrete walkthrough of the four properties that separate a tool a model uses correctly from one it fumbles: legible schemas, validating boundaries, recoverable errors, and idempotency — with before-and-after code.

Retries feel cheap and local. In a multi-step agent they’re neither. A small cost model shows why 20% per-step failure can more than double your bill — and how your recovery architecture, not your failure rate, decides the multiplier.