Ashish Kr Jha

Good catch. Once the task moves inline, the request timeout becomes part of the same failure budget. Bounded it at 5s per attempt and 12s total across attempts and backoff. The post also understates the normal case, since signup sends two emails sequentially, so that needs a correction too.

Exactly. The useful question turned out to be less “what can I optimize?” and more “what actually needs to exist all the time?”

Good way to put it. The silent-failure part is what made that option especially dangerous, and the agent/context angle is the part I ended up taking away from it too.