AI Agents Are Just Distributed Systems Now — Salman Munaf, TikTok
Aug 29, 2026 · 19:48
Salman Munaf, TikTok site reliability engineer, argues AI agents are distributed systems once they call external services; deterministic controls must surround the probabilistic coordinator. A refund timeout illustrates it: timeout means unknown, not failure, and retrying can double-refund without request IDs, idempotency keys, and status lookups. He urges persisting every step, defining compensating actions, treating action-influencing context as cacheable state with invalidation and provenance, and adding guardrails: circuit breakers, budgets, exponential backoff, scoped read/write credentials, and approvals bound to action, timestamp, actor, expiration. Observability must trace prompts, calls, writes; tool contracts embed idempotency; ask what system lets the agent do when wrong.
