Network Resilience — What Claude Gets Wrong

You write network calls as if the network is reliable. No timeouts, no retries, no circuit breaking. Your code works in development and fails on the first packet drop in production.

The Five Requirements

Every network call in production code must have:

1. Timeout — explicit, per-request
2. Retry — with exponential backoff + jitter, only for transient failures
3. Idempotency — safe to retry (GET is free; POST needs an idempotency key)
4. Partial failure handling — degrade gracefully when some calls fail
5. Observability — log attempt, duration, status, failure reason

Anti-Patterns You Default To