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+# Client Resiliency in the GoDaddy CLI
+
+How much human review this doc has had:
+
+- Origin: Human-Written / **AI-Assisted**
+- Review: Unread / Skimmed / **Read in Full**
+- Accuracy: Unverified / **Believed Accurate** / Fully Verified
+- Content: Untrimmed / **Trimmed**
+
+We are building an agent-first CLI and shipping it to customers as the primary programmatic surface for the GoDaddy Developer Platform.
+Every resiliency decision we make in `gddy` becomes load characteristics on our own APIs, multiplied by every customer who installs it.
+
+This proposal argues that retry behavior belongs to the library rather than the caller, states the risk we carry today, and lays out an ordered set of changes across `gddy` and `cli-engine`.
+
+## The risk
+
+Client-side retries are multiplicative, invisible to the caller, and worst exactly when the system is already degraded.
+GitHub's [August 17 outage](https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead/) is a current example: a client-side retry loop against Copilot services amplified traffic during an already-degraded window and extended an outage to nearly eight hours.
+Their stated remediation is consistent retry limits, retry budgets, and variable timeouts enforced across service-to-service calls, not left to each caller.
+
+We have three distinct exposures.
+
+### 1. Unbounded hangs
+
+Three of our four HTTP client constructors set a user agent and nothing else.
+
+- `make_http_client()` at `rust/src/application/client.rs:16`, used by `application`, `hosting`, `webhook`, `api_explorer`, and `graphql`
+- `client_with_auth()` at `rust/domains-client/src/lib.rs:135`, used by every `domain` and `dns` command
+- `OnboardingClient::new()` at `rust/src/onboarding/client.rs:28`
+
+`reqwest` applies no request timeout by default.
+A degraded API therefore hangs `gddy` indefinitely, and the retry logic in `cli-engine` never fires because no attempt ever completes.
+Every other item in this document depends on fixing this one first.
+
+`gddy update` is the exception and the model to copy: 2s background and 15s foreground timeouts, applied per request (`rust/src/update/mod.rs:45`).
+
+### 2. Synchronized retry amplification
+
+`cli-engine` retries with deterministic exponential backoff and no jitter (`transport/client.rs:19`).
+When a shared dependency fails, every client that saw the failure retries at the same instant.
+Layered against a service that also retries, the amplification compounds:
+
+```mermaid
+flowchart LR
+    A[1 user command] -->|3 attempts| B[gddy]
+    B -->|3 attempts| C[API layer]
+    C -->|3 attempts| D[Downstream service]
+    D --> E[27 requests<br/>arriving in 3 synchronized bursts]
+```
+
+Two aggravating factors in our current code.
+`gddy` never routes product API calls through `cli-engine`'s retrying transport; every call site builds a bare `reqwest` client and uses `cli_engine::transport` only for debug logging.
+And `gddy` carries a second, independent retry implementation for artifact upload (`rust/src/application/client.rs:300`), which is how retries end up stacking at two layers inside one binary.
+
+### 3. The agent as amplifier
+
+Our polling commands do not loop internally.
+They return a `NextAction` reading "Re-check job status" and hand control back to the agent (`rust/src/hosting/nodejs/job.rs:56`, `source/status.rs:33`, `source/git.rs:123`).
+`NextAction` has no interval field (`rust/src/next_action.rs`), and nothing in `AGENTS.md`, `docs/`, or the `gddy` plugin skill tells an agent how long to wait.
+
+An LLM handed "re-check this" with no interval will poll as fast as it can loop, and we asked it to.
+That pattern appears across 100 `next_action` call sites.
+
+Our error hints compound it.
+`rust/src/error.rs:38`, `:40`, and `:43` all advise "retry" as the recovery step, including for 5xx.
+Agents follow those literally.
+
+## Current state against AWS standard mode
+
+Source: [AWS SDKs and Tools Reference Guide, Retry behavior](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdkref/latest/guide/feature-retry-behavior.html).
+Every value in the table below is from that page, as is the long-polling precedent in item 6.
+AWS is making this behavior the default across all SDKs, currently opt-in via `AWS_NEW_RETRIES_2026=true` ([announcement](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/announcing-updated-retry-behavior-for-aws-sdks-and-tools/)).
+
+It is a good target because it is the accumulated answer to this exact problem, already proven across every AWS service and client language.
+
+| | AWS standard | `cli-engine` 0.8.6 | `gddy` product calls |
+| --- | --- | --- | --- |
+| Max attempts | 3 | 3 | 1 (no retry) |
+| Backoff | `random(0,1) × min(20s, base × 2^retry)` | `500ms × 2^attempt` | none |
+| Jitter | Full jitter | None | n/a |
+| Base delay | 50ms transient, 1000ms throttling | 500ms for both | n/a |
+| Retry quota | 500 tokens, 14/transient, 5/throttle | None | None |
+| Server-directed delay | Honors `x-amz-retry-after` | Ignored | Ignored |
+| Timeouts | Connect, per-attempt, overall | None | None |
+| Retries 429 | Yes | Yes | No |
+| Retries 5xx | By error classification | Idempotent methods only | No |
+
+`cli-engine` sits between AWS legacy and standard mode, and it already has the retry loop, backoff, and 429 classification to build on.
+`gddy`'s product calls currently bypass it, which makes routing them through it the highest-leverage change on the list.
+
+`cli-engine` uses one 500ms base delay for every retryable error.
+Transient errors and throttling responses want opposite treatment: a connection reset usually clears in milliseconds, while a 429 means the service needs time to recover capacity.
+AWS splits them at 50ms and 1000ms.
+A single value between the two adds latency to the first case and load to the second.
+
+The `is_idempotent` restriction at `transport/client.rs:1282` is more conservative than AWS and we should keep it.
+We do not have idempotency tokens on most endpoints, so declining to retry non-idempotent 5xx is correct.
+
+## Proposal
+
+Ordered by dependency. Item 6 has no dependency on the others and can land in parallel.
+
+### 1. Timeouts on every client
+
+Connect timeout, per-attempt timeout, and an overall deadline that bounds the full retry sequence rather than each attempt.
+Without the overall deadline, three attempts of a slow request stack latency without bound.
+
+Proposed defaults: 5s connect, 30s per attempt, 90s overall.
+Transfer commands (`platform app deploy`, artifact upload) get 120s per attempt and 600s overall.
+
+Nothing else in this list functions until this lands.
+
+### 2. Route `gddy` through `cli-engine`'s transport
+
+Replace the three bare `reqwest` constructors with `cli_engine::transport::HttpClient`.
+This is where most of the value is, because it makes every subsequent policy change a single edit in `cli-engine` rather than a sweep across the CLI.
+
+Delete the hand-rolled upload retry at `rust/src/application/client.rs:300` as part of this rather than fixing it in place.
+Its tests at `:663` and `:695` move to cover the shared policy.
+
+### 3. Full jitter and split base delays in `cli-engine`
+
+Adopt AWS's formula and constants directly.
+
+- `delay = random(0,1) × min(20s, base × 2^retry)`
+- `base` = 50ms for transient errors, 1000ms for throttling
+- Max attempts stays at 3
+
+Classify on status code, since we have no modeled error codes to key off: 429 and `Retry-After`-bearing 503 are throttling, other 5xx and connection failures are transient.
+
+### 4. Retry quota in `cli-engine`
+
+An in-process token bucket on the AWS standard constants.
+
+- 500 token capacity, starting full
+- 14 tokens per transient retry, 5 per throttling retry
+- Refund the consumed cost when a retry succeeds, plus 1 token on a first-try success
+- When the budget empties, return the error without retrying
+
+This turns "retry 3 times" from an unconditional behavior into one that yields during a broad failure.
+With 3 max attempts it starts draining at roughly 22% sustained transient failure, so normal operation never notices it.
+It is the item aimed most directly at the failure mode in the GitHub postmortem.
+
+### 5. Honor `Retry-After`, in-process and across invocations
+
+When a 429 or 503 carries `Retry-After`, use the server's value clamped the way AWS clamps it: no lower than the computed backoff, no higher than computed backoff plus 5s, and no jitter applied on top since the server is expected to jitter it.
+
+Also persist it.
+Write a single "do not call `{host}` before `T`" timestamp per environment under `~/.config/gddy/`.
+On the next invocation, if `now < T`, sleep or fail fast with a message stating why and for how long.
+
+This is one timestamp rather than an accounting system.
+It is server-authoritative rather than us guessing, and it fails open when the file is missing or unparseable.
+It is the only control here that survives process exit, which is what makes it the answer to a user or agent looping straight through a throttle response.
+
+Our platform APIs do not send `Retry-After` today.
+This ships as a no-op against them and starts working the moment they do, so it needs no coordination to land.
+`gddy update` already established the persisted-cooldown pattern with its 24h cache TTL.
+
+### 6. Enforced minimum poll interval
+
+Add a minimum interval to `NextAction` and have the CLI refuse to re-poll the same resource faster than that interval, sleeping rather than passing the request through.
+Default to 3s, matching the existing poll cadence in `domain purchase` (`rust/src/domain/purchase.rs:347`).
+
+The retry quota in item 4 does not cover this, and the distinction matters.
+A quota governs retries, and an agent re-invoking `gddy hosting nodejs job get` in a loop is not retrying.
+Each call is a fresh request that succeeds with a "pending" status, so the bucket is never debited.
+First-try successes credit it, so a hot poll loop leaves the quota full while generating unbounded load.
+Each invocation is also a new process, so an in-process bucket starts full regardless.
+
+Retries are failure-driven amplification. Poll loops are success-driven request rate. They need separate controls.
+
+AWS reached the same conclusion for [long-polling operations](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdkref/latest/guide/feature-retry-behavior.html#long-polling-operations) such as `SQS.ReceiveMessage`, where the SDK applies a backoff delay before returning even when it is not retrying, specifically because those operations are called in tight loops and a fast-returning SDK makes the caller's loop hot-spin.
+AWS did not document a recommended interval and trust callers to honor it.
+The library enforces it.
+We should do the same, because our caller is an LLM and pacing is not something we can document our way out of.
+
+## Explicitly rejected: a persistent retry budget
+
+A cross-invocation token bucket on disk is the intuitive answer to "what if someone runs the command in a loop." AWS does not do it, and their docs are explicit that the budget "is not shared across processes or hosts."
+
+A retry budget bounds amplification, not load.
+1000 invocations is 1000 requests: linear, visible to whoever wrote the loop, and indistinguishable from 1000 legitimate users.
+Per-machine state also cannot see aggregate load (500 CI runners get 500 separate files) while adding file locking and clock-skew failure modes, where a command fails because of an unrelated invocation twenty minutes earlier.
+
+Item 5 is the version worth building, scoped to a signal the server actually sent us.
+
+## What this does not solve
+
+Client-side controls are advisory.
+They reduce amplification and stop us from making a bad situation worse, and they cannot protect our APIs from aggregate load, because no client can see aggregate load.
+Server-side throttling remains the actual defense, and this work should not be mistaken for it.