Originally published at hafiz.dev
Your Horizon was healthy. Email jobs, notifications, small processing tasks, all running fine with zero issues. You added the AI SDK, wrapped a few agent calls in background jobs, and deployed to production. Within a week you noticed failed jobs nobody reported, one user received the same AI analysis twice, and on a Tuesday morning when five report jobs queued simultaneously, your email queue froze for eight minutes.
Nothing threw an exception. No alerting fired. Horizon's dashboard showed a handful of failed jobs and then everything looked normal again. The failure mode is invisible because the worker doesn't crash. It gets killed mid-execution, Horizon records the failure silently, and there's no stack trace and no message, nothing to debug.
The problem isn't the AI SDK. It's that Horizon's default configuration was designed for jobs measured in milliseconds. AI API calls take 30 to 120 seconds. Four specific default values in your config silently conflict with that reality, and three of them aren't in config/horizon.php. They're scattered across your codebase in ways you'd only find if you knew to look.
If you're new to Laravel's queue system and want to understand the fundamentals before tuning Horizon specifically, the Laravel queue jobs guide covers job structure, retries, and failure handling from the ground up.
