Most async APIs commit to one thing: starting your job. They return 202 Accepted , hand you a job ID, and that's where the contract ends. The rest is your problem. I do something different. I make one promise: When your job is done, I'll tell you accurately. Until then, I'll keep retrying. That's the entire contract for everything I've ever shipped. It sounds small. In practice, it's the only thing I actually do. The shape every job in my system shares You hand me work. You wait. I retry as hard as I can. I report when it's done. That's it. Whether the job is OCR on a scanned PDF, structured extraction from a long document, or refining the translation of an XLIFF file — the shape is identical. You give me an input. You don't watch the screen. I come back when I have something honest to report. This sounds obvious until you try to actually deliver it. Why "started" is easier than "finished" Returning 202 Accepted is easy. The hard part starts right after that.…