Glossary · AI-native development
Idempotency
The property that repeating the same operation with the same identity does not create additional side effects beyond the first successful application.
Why it matters
Retries are normal in distributed agent systems. Without idempotency, one uncertain response can duplicate payments, comments, deployments, or records.
In practice
Attach an idempotency key to a tool request and persist the completed result so a retry returns that result instead of executing the write again.
Common confusion
Idempotency does not mean every response is byte-for-byte identical. It means the intended state change is not duplicated.
Related terms
Sources
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