Before Your Agent Calls an API at 3am: A Reliability Checklist

Before Your Agent Calls an API at 3am: A Reliability Checklist You're in bed. Your agent is running. It calls a payment API to complete a transaction — gets a 500 back, retries three times, creates three duplicate charges. By the time you check Slack in the morning, three users have filed disputes. This isn't hypothetical. It's the failure mode developers hit when they treat agent integrations the same as human integrations. The core problem: APIs are built for developers who can read error messages, click "Retry," and handle edge cases manually. Agents can't do any of that. They need APIs that communicate failures clearly, handle concurrent calls predictably, and allow credentials to be managed programmatically. Most APIs don't. The 5 Questions That Separate "Works" from "Works at 3am" We've scored 650+ APIs across 20 dimensions for agent-nativeness. When we look at what actually causes production failures in agent deployments, five questions account for 80% of incidents. Run this che