Reliability & payments

Designing honest systems for uncertain networks, retries, timeouts, and money movement.

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Reliability & payments essays

1 essay

2026

ai & agents / 30 Jul 2026 / 9 min Agents can pay now. That was the easy half. A payments engineer reads the x402 spec: idempotency is an optional extension whose own guidance says to charge again when the cache fails, the documented refund is the seller voluntarily sending money back, and reversal only becomes possible where settlement stops being instant.