# Agent Mesh: Reliability Primitives for Non-Idempotent Agent Delegation - Identity Adequacy and Evidence Adequacy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26225/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13657/) (2025)
- [Defeating Prompt Injections by Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18813/) (2025)
- [Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16416/) (2025)
- [Securing AI Agents with Information-Flow Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23643/) (2025)
- [Lightweight Asynchronous Snapshots for Distributed Dataflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08603/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous agents increasingly perform bounded software tasks under an orchestrator that retries, resumes, and budgets them. The machinery such orchestrators reach for is the service mesh's: retry, timeout, and error-rate circuit breaking. We report a failure study of a production agentic software-delivery platform over 147 numbered incidents spanning 81 runs, each with a measured cost and, in most cases, a mutation proof reproducing the failure. All three assumptions those primitives rest on are violated in practice, and we quantify the consequences: a loop of fifty-four consecutive successful tool calls no error-rate breaker could see; a progress signal constant by construction, guaranteeing a false trip on the third repair round and driving one run from six of six components to three; twenty-one events accumulated across six invocations of one delegation, making a correct, idempotent component unwinnable; a misrouted failure that woke five components for a two-component fault, leaving three bystanders regressing working code; and twelve incidents in which the enforcement layer blocked correct work, the most expensive costing 107 agent turns and zero accepted writes. We find one cross-cutting cause and its dual. Identity adequacy: in five separate subsystems an identity that failed to discriminate produced a confident wrong answer, and two of them derived the corrective rule independently. Evidence adequacy: a reliability decision may be taken only on evidence capable of moving, attributable to what it measures, and deterministic under identical conditions. From the findings we derive seven reliability primitives whose enforcement unit is the delegation rather than the message, and specify the controlled evaluation the study motivates but does not constitute.