Retry Budgets for Tool-Using Agents: When Is Trying Again Worth It?

Abstract

Agents that retry failed tool calls recover from transient errors but can also compound mistakes and waste resources. We analyse 18,000 recorded agent runs and show that retries help for network and rate-limit errors but hurt for malformed arguments. We propose a retry budget that depends on the error class and show that it improves success by 6 points at equal cost.

Keywords agents · retries · failure analysis · tool use