The original title is: "Idempotency: Why "Just Retry It" Breaks More Than It Fixes"

Short summary

A deep dive into why retry logic in distributed systems causes duplicate operations when idempotency isn't designed in from the start. The article explains how timeouts create ambiguity, why at-least-once delivery from message queues demands idempotent consumers, and how idempotency keys provide the standard fix. Practical examples cover HTTP methods, message queues, and database writes.

• •Timeouts are unavoidable in distributed systems, making retries mandatory not optional
• •Idempotency is a design property of operations, not a retry mechanism
• •Idempotency keys are the standard fix: client sends unique ID, server deduplicates

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