Many release pipelines automate everything up to the moment a human says "yes," then quietly hand the rest back to a person. Closing that last gap looks like a small scripting task. It usually isn't. The hard part after human acceptance isn't running one more command — it's deciding who is allowed t...

The moment you let an automated system retry its own failed work, you have introduced a loop. And a loop with no bound is a liability. So you add a budget: three attempts, then stop and escalate. That part is easy to describe and easy to get wrong, because the hard question is not how many retries y...