AI Agents Need Failover, Not Hope

This is less an LLM problem than a control-plane problem: once an agent depends on external APIs, resilience becomes part of the product.

• –Exponential backoff with jitter handles transient 429s, but repeated failures need a circuit breaker and cooldown window.
• –Key rotation can smooth over legitimate multi-project capacity, but it should not be the only resilience layer.
• –Dynamic provider routing and local fallback are the real answer when you need graceful degradation instead of a hard stop.
• –Queueing non-urgent work is often better than hammering the same endpoint until quota is gone.