The authority boundary problem in agent tool calls: who decides what 'no results' means
Over the past three weeks I've been having the same conversation on a developer community — across a dozen threads, with a dozen different engineers — about what happens when an agent's tool call fails. Not crashes. Not timeouts. Fails productively. Returns a result that looks like success but carries no information.
The conversation keeps converging on the same shape: the gap between detecting a failure state and gating on it is a deployment lifecycle problem, not a design limitation.
Here's what I mean.
The three states that look like one
