.NET Built-in Retry Policies for Agent Calls

[lukemurraynz]

Current Behavior: No built-in retry logic. Transient failures (network timeouts, rate limiting) require manual retry implementation.

Problem: AI APIs are inherently unreliable (rate limits, throttling, transient errors). Every production application needs retry logic.

Recommended Changes:

Integrate with Microsoft.Extensions.Http.Resilience patterns
Add RetryPolicy to AgentRunOptions
Support exponential backoff and circuit breaker patterns
Provide sensible defaults for common scenarios
Example Desired API:

// Built-in retry configuration
var agent = chatClient.CreateAIAgent(
    name: "ReliableAgent",
    instructions: "...",
    options: new AgentOptions
    {
        RetryPolicy = RetryPolicy.Exponential(
            maxRetries: 3,
            baseDelay: TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1))
    });

// Or per-invocation override
var result = await agent.RunAsync(
    prompt,
    options: new AgentRunOptions
    {
        RetryPolicy = RetryPolicy.NoRetry  // Disable for this call
    });

[markwallace-microsoft]

@rogerbarreto What is our recommended approach for this issue?

[rogerbarreto]

Setting the retry policies are by default a configuration of the clients provided by the underlying SDK responsible to the given provider.

OpenAI SDK

For the given scenario this should be achieved while initializing the OpenAIClient which has the optionality to set the policies.

See:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-net/blob/2e20e55043d35500fe31e74f2915217b2f3746f9/sdk/core/System.ClientModel/src/Pipeline/ClientRetryPolicy.cs#L297

var openAIClient = new OpenAIClient(new ApiKeyCredential("..."), new OpenAIClientOptions() 
{ 
    // This policy has already the exponential backoff implemented in it.
    RetryPolicy = new ClientRetryPolicy(maxRetries: 3) 
});

Your example would just work with this new policy moving forward. This is also truth to any other provider which gives you options in the client level to provide what is the resiliency strategy.

// Built-in retry configuration (defined in the client).
var agent = openAIClient.GetChatClient("model").CreateAIAgent(
    name: "ReliableAgent",
    instructions: "...");

// Or per-invocation override
var result = await agent.RunAsync(prompt);

Note

Even if we provided an abstract way of giving you a Retry options per-run, we would not be able to override the client configuration and could create some very undersireable scenarios where the client has a resiliency setting and Microsoft Agent Framework applies resiliency behaviors on top of those potentially creating unexpected and unpredicted behaviors.