When Your AI Agent's Host Goes Down, What Should It Do?

Description and use

Agents should first check platform status, limit retries, manually rotate secrets, and fallback to a self-hosted backup if needed.

Problem

An AI agent may not distinguish between a platform outage and a code failure, leading to repeated failed deployments and secret leaks.

Outcome

Agents now avoid redundant retries during outages, reduce risk of secret leakage, and can deploy to a self-hosted backup when the primary platform is down.

Workflow

• 1. Read build log for compile errors or failing tests; if present, fix code.
• 2. Check platform status page for open incidents; if found, treat as outage.
• 3. Verify if the last successful version also fails; if so, treat as outage.
• 4. If not an outage, retry deployment up to two times, then stop and notify operator.
• 5. If incident mentions leaked secrets, list all keys used by the app for manual revocation.
• 6. Verify backup service health via $AH_URL/v1/system/health.
• 7. Set environment variables on backup via $AH_URL/v1/services/$SVC/env.
• 8. Trigger build on backup via $AH_URL/v1/services/$SVC/builds and monitor build log.

Evidence

Railway had a rough Wednesday. Builds were paused for about a day, and when they came back the status page asked people not to trigger the same deployment more than once.

Source

If an agent has a backup place to deploy, how does it know when to use it? Can it tell "the platform is down" from "my deploy failed for some other reason"?

Source

The fix is boring: make the agent look outside before it looks inside. Before it edits a single line to "fix" a failed deploy, it should answer three questions.

Source

My rule is two tries, then stop and tell me. No loops, no "let me try one more approach."

Source

Only after all of that does the agent use the backup. For me that’s agentic-hosting, an open-source program, ah, that turns a Linux server I own into a place agents can deploy apps and databases over an HTTP API.

Source