How would you make an AI operation idempotent?

Uses stable operation identities, persisted states, deduplication, side-effect keys, and replay rules across requests and workers.

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TL;DR

The client or application assigns a stable idempotency key to the logical operation, and the server persists its status before expensive work begins. Repeated requests with the same key return or resume the same operation instead of starting another model call blindly. Any tool or business side effect receives its own stable key and is committed through application code, not inferred from generated text.

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Ambiguous outcomes, duplicate delivery, state transitions, and side-effect safety.

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Overview
Nondeterministic output does not remove the need for deterministic operation semantics.
The client or application assigns a stable idempotency key to the logical operation, and the server persists its status before expensive work begins. Repeated requests with the same key return or resume the same operation instead of starting another model call blindly. Any tool or business side effect receives its own stable key and is committed through application code, not inferred from generated text.
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Stronger answer
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The operation record distinguishes accepted, running, completed, failed, and cancelled outcomes and stores the exact configuration used. Workers claim steps atomically and can repeat safe computation while deduplicating irreversible effects. If the first provider call times out ambiguously, the application records that uncertainty and follows provider-specific reconciliation rather than assuming nothing happened.

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Common mistakesCandidateCommon mistakesMistakes that weaken the answer or signal shallow understanding.Open details

Details

Using the model response text as a deduplication key.
Persisting the operation only after inference completes.
Assuming queue delivery is exactly once.

How would you make an AI operation idempotent?

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