Frontier Engineering
Tool Use & Function Calling

Tool Retry Policy

A tool retry policy defines how an agent responds when a tool call fails transiently — how many times to retry, how long to wait between attempts, and when to give up or escalate. Exponential backoff spaces retries to avoid overwhelming a struggling service. A well-designed policy distinguishes retryable errors like timeouts from permanent ones like invalid arguments, which should not be retried.