User Spec

Topic

Agent Error Recovery and Rollback for Multi-Agent Systems

Goal

Produce a credible IETF-style Internet-Draft for a narrowly scoped mechanism that standardizes how cooperating agents report failures, define rollback scope, and execute coordinated recovery without cascading damage.

Intended status

Experimental.

Rationale: the problem is clearly real and under-specified, but the ecosystem is still young and the mechanism should not pretend to have full deployment consensus yet.

Problem to solve

Current AI-agent and autonomous-operations drafts define communication, identity, and orchestration patterns, but the landscape analysis shows no common mechanism for:

signaling execution failure in a machine-actionable way
declaring rollback boundaries and blast radius
coordinating rollback across dependent agents
recording recovery outcomes for audit and future trust decisions

This creates high interoperability and safety risk for autonomous systems that act across multiple services or domains.

What must be true in the final draft

The draft stays tightly scoped to recovery and rollback semantics, not a full agent architecture.
The mechanism is protocol-agnostic enough to work across multiple agent ecosystems.
The draft defines concrete states, triggers, and recovery procedures that two implementers could follow consistently.
Security Considerations meaningfully address spoofed rollback, unauthorized override, replay, and denial-of-service by false failure signaling.
The text is shaped like a real Internet-Draft, not a product design memo.
The draft clearly states what is in scope now and what is deferred to later work such as richer workflow orchestration or dynamic trust scoring.

Constraints

scope constraints Keep this to rollback and recovery coordination. Do not absorb lifecycle management, full workflow DAG standardization, or human override into the core mechanism except where needed as interfaces.
compatibility constraints Reuse adjacent concepts where possible from existing IETF-style work on execution evidence, attestation, or agent communication. Do not invent a full new identity or transport stack.
terminology constraints Use conservative standards language. Prefer terms like agent, execution, checkpoint, rollback set, dependency, and recovery record. Avoid buzzwords and branding.

Source materials to prioritize

/home/c/projects/ietf-draft-analyzer/data/reports/gaps.md
/home/c/projects/ietf-draft-analyzer/data/reports/holistic-agent-ecosystem-draft-outlines.md
/home/c/projects/ietf-draft-analyzer/data/reports/ideas.md
/home/c/projects/ietf-draft-analyzer/data/reports/overview.md
draft-yue-anima-agent-recovery-networks
draft-li-dmsc-macp
draft-fu-nmop-agent-communication-framework
draft-srijal-agents-policy
related WIMSE or ECT materials when they help avoid redefining execution evidence

Success criteria

A reader can tell exactly what an agent must emit or process when a task fails.
A reader can tell how rollback scope is determined and how dependent agents respond.
The draft includes enough structure to support interoperability testing later.
Specialist reviewers can criticize the draft on substance rather than on missing basic sections or obvious ambiguity.

Questions for the team

What is the smallest interoperable core for rollback semantics?
Should checkpoints and recovery records be abstract objects, protocol messages, or profileable metadata on top of another carrier?
What information is mandatory in a failure signal versus optional?
How should rollback interact with partially completed downstream work?

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