Stop Your AI Agents From Crashing, Looping, and Burning Through Tokens

It sounds like you're working with a sophisticated middleware system designed to enhance the reliability and efficiency of agents (or bots) that interact with large language models or other AI systems. The two middlewares, softFail and smartMaxTurns, address common issues in agent-based workflows: handling failures gracefully and preventing infinite loops.

Understanding softFail

The softFail middleware is designed to handle transient errors and interruptions more gracefully than simply terminating the process when an error occurs or a timeout happens. Here's how it works:

1. Error Handling: When an error occurs (e.g., network issues, server timeouts), instead of immediately failing, softFail catches these exceptions.
2. Context Preservation: It captures all the context accumulated up to that point in the conversation (response.messages). This ensures no work is lost when a failure happens.
3. Retry Mechanism: While not explicitly part of softFail, it can be combined with other middlewares like retry to attempt recovery from transient errors.
4. Fallback and Continuation: If an error occurs, the middleware allows for either retrying immediately or continuing later after user intervention (e.g., re-establishing a network connection). 5

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