Add the missing timeout, retry budget, or breaker
The call that hung and took the service with it, given a bound.
The ticket
Add a timeout, a bounded retry budget, and a breaker to the call that hung during the incident.
Acceptance criteria
- The call has an explicit timeout rather than a library default
- Retries are bounded and backed off
- A breaker opens after a stated failure rate
- Tests cover the timeout, the exhausted retry budget, and the open breaker
What lands as proof
Tests that force each failure mode and assert the caller degrades instead of hanging.
Why teams defer it
- Defaults are invisible until they are wrong, and most clients default to waiting forever.
- Choosing the numbers needs data about normal latency, which usually is not collected yet.
Questions
- What does the agent actually change?
- The ticket is scoped to one outcome: add a timeout, a bounded retry budget, and a breaker to the call that hung during the incident. Work that serves that outcome is in scope, and anything outside it is left for a separate ticket, so the pull request stays reviewable.
- How do I know the work is done?
- The pull request carries the evidence, not only the diff. Here that means failure-path tests at the boundary, defaults documented, so a reviewer can confirm the result without reproducing the work locally.
- How much oversight does this need?
- The run stops once the plan is written. Somebody reads the approach and approves it before any code exists, which is the cheapest moment to redirect the work.