When a team allows work to be revised and reworked — a document, a plan, a piece of code — there is an easy trap: assuming that "prevent stale overwrites" is a small file-comparison problem. It isn't. It's a lifecycle-contract problem, and treating it as anything smaller tends to produce a fix that ...

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...