Heng Li

Repair Economics for Tool-Calling LLM Agents: the Gain, the Side Effects and the Cost of Failure Recovery

Agents built on large language models (LLMs) do their work by calling tools, and tools fail. The default engineering answer — “wrap it in a retry” — is never costed. We study repair economics: what a failure-recovery strategy buys in task success, what it costs in API calls, and what it leaves behind in duplicate or un...