It's 3AM. Your pager goes off. The AI product you built is down — not because of a bug in your code, but because OpenAI just returned a 429. Again. Your users see error messages. Your agent loops are stuck. Your batch pipeline just burned $47 in retry tokens with zero results. Sound familiar? The Real Problem: Retry Isn't Recovery Every AI developer knows the pattern: import time from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI () for attempt in range ( 3 ): try : response = client . chat . completions . create ( model = " gpt-4o " , messages = [{ " role " : " user " , " content " : prompt }] ) break except Exception as e : time . sleep ( 2 ** attempt ) continue else : raise RuntimeError ( " API failed after 3 retries " ) Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode This is not resilience. This is hope dressed up as engineering.…