Agent Reliability: Making Autonomous Systems Actually Work

The Problem

We have overnight research, heartbeats, cron jobs. But do they WORK?

Research Questions

1. Error Recovery

   • What happens when a script fails?
   • How do we know it failed?
   • Auto-retry strategies
   • Dead letter queues

2. Quality Control

   • How to validate AI output before acting on it?
   • Confidence thresholds
   • Human-in-the-loop gates

3. Observability

   • Logging best practices
   • Metrics to track
   • Alerting thresholds

4. Multi-Agent Coordination

   • When to use sub-agents?
   • How to share context?
   • Avoiding duplicate work

Patterns to Study

• LangChain error handling
• CrewAI coordination
• AutoGPT recovery patterns

Apply to Gordon

• Audit all cron jobs for failure modes
• Add error alerting
• Implement retry logic
• Create health dashboard