agent stuck: retrying a failed webhook subscription that 404s every time

Not specified by the original author.

TL;DR

A 404 on a subscription endpoint means the thing subscribed to, or the subscription itself, no longer exists; retrying cannot resurrect it. The agent must classify 404 as terminal, verify whether the target resource and subscription exist at the provider, recreate the subscription against the correct resource, and hand the dead one to a human instead of looping forever.

agent stuck: retrying a failed webhook subscription that 404s every time

Use this when

• Logs show repeated webhook subscription attempts failing with 404
• The loop runs for hours or days without escalation
• The subscribed resource may have been deleted or its id changed

Not for this skill when

• The provider is mid-incident and 404s are widespread and temporary
• The 404 is on event delivery to your endpoint, a different problem

Steps

1. Read the exact request the agent repeats: URL, resource id, and the provider's 404 body. Verify: the missing resource or subscription is identified precisely
2. Query the provider for the resource and for existing subscriptions on it. Verify: what exists and what is gone is established from the source
3. Classify the failure in code: 404 on subscription management is terminal, not retryable. Verify: the retry policy now stops on this class
4. Recreate the subscription against the verified resource, or route to a human if the resource is genuinely gone. Verify: a working subscription exists or a human owns the decision
5. Add a repeated-terminal-error alert: the same terminal failure three times pages instead of looping. Verify: no terminal error can loop unnoticed again

Variant phrasings

agent retrying webhook subscription 404

A related phrasing for the same underlying problem.

terminal 404 treated as retryable

A related phrasing for the same underlying problem.

webhook subscription resource gone

A related phrasing for the same underlying problem.

Compatibility: Compatibility: webhook subscription management against billing, CRM, and product APIs from agent code, current versions.

Why it happens

Retry policy is error classification. Transient errors deserve retries; existence errors deserve a different action entirely. Agents that retry everything uniformly convert a five-minute recreation task into an infinite loop that also hides the real problem in noise.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• Some providers return 404 for permission-hidden resources. Verify with an admin-scoped read before concluding deletion.
• Recreated subscriptions may replay missed events. Ensure handlers are idempotent before recreating.
• Log the terminal classification decision; future debuggers need to know why the agent stopped.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstb5u55QXGJQJS8aofFfDtg

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstb5u55QXGJQJS8aofFfDtg

Thread query: agent stuck: retrying a failed webhook subscription that 404s every time

TL;DR: A 404 on a subscription endpoint means the thing subscribed to, or the subscription itself, no longer exists; retrying cannot resurrect it. The agent must classify 404 as terminal, verify whether the target resource and subscription exist at the provider, recreate the subscription against the correct resource, and hand the dead one to a human instead of looping forever.

Not specified by the original author.

TL;DR

A webhook destination is down and the agent retries on a tight loop with no exit. Fix: bound the retries with exponential backoff plus jitter, classify failures so permanent ones stop immediately, and send survivors to a dead-letter queue with their failure history. A retry loop without a ceiling is a bug, not resilience.

fraud agent stuck retrying a failed webhook delivery forever

Use this when

• One delivery id accumulates attempts with no bound in sight.
• A dead destination slows the whole queue because workers are stuck on it.
• Retry logs show constant intervals hammering an endpoint.

Not for this skill when

• A delivery fails once or twice and then succeeds. That is a healthy retry.
• The endpoint is up but slow. That is a timeout tuning problem.

Steps

1. Confirm the loop: find the delivery id being retried and count its attempts. Verify: attempts exceed any sane bound, like ten.
2. Set a max attempt count of five to eight with exponential backoff from about one second, plus jitter. Verify: retry intervals grow and vary between attempts.
3. Classify failures: client errors go straight to the dead-letter queue with no retries, except 408 and 429 which are retryable. Verify: a 400 is never retried.
4. After the final attempt, write the payload to the dead-letter queue with the full failure history and alert once. Verify: the payload is inspectable and replayable by hand.
5. Add a circuit breaker: when one destination fails repeatedly, pause all deliveries to it for a window. Verify: a single bad endpoint stops poisoning the whole queue.

Variant phrasings

webhook retry loop never stops

Common phrasing.

infinite webhook redelivery

Delivery-focused search.

agent retries failed webhook forever

Agent-focused phrasing.

Compatibility: any webhook sender; the pattern is identical whether the queue is SQS, RabbitMQ, or a database table.

Why it happens

The retry code was written for the happy path, where the endpoint blipped and one more try fixes it. Nobody defined what happens when the endpoint is really gone, so "keep trying" quietly became the entire program.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• Honor the Retry-After header on 429s; do not lump rate limits in with other client errors.
• Poison payloads that crash the sender need a catch around the send, a DLQ write, and the queue keeps moving.
• Replaying the DLQ later needs the same idempotency keys, or replays double-apply.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstLoSN8D5PjqWbtyMZno8YA

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstLoSN8D5PjqWbtyMZno8YA

Thread query: fraud agent stuck retrying a failed webhook delivery forever

TL;DR: A webhook destination is down and the agent retries on a tight loop with no exit. Fix: bound the retries with exponential backoff plus jitter, classify failures so permanent ones stop immediately, and send survivors to a dead-letter queue with their failure history. A retry loop without a ceiling is a bug, not resilience.

Not specified by the original author.

TL;DR: Detect the 410 and automatically re-create the webhook subscription, then persist the new subscription ID. A 410 Gone on a Lever webhook subscription means that subscription is dead and will never deliver again - polling it or retrying the same subscription ID cannot recover. The agent needs a re-subscribe path, not a retry loop.

410 Gone - subscription expired

1. Confirm the subscription is actually dead: query the webhook subscription status in Lever or check the subscription management endpoint. Expected: the subscription shows as expired or missing.
2. Create a fresh webhook subscription with the same event types and target URL as the dead one. Expected: a new subscription ID is returned.
3. Persist the new subscription ID in the agent's config or state store, replacing the old one everywhere it is referenced. Expected: no code or config still points at the expired subscription ID.
4. Backfill the gap: pull events or changes since the subscription died (Lever's list endpoints support updated-at filters) so nothing that happened during the outage is lost. Expected: the missed window is covered by the backfill.
5. Add a health check that verifies the subscription is alive on a schedule (for example daily) and pages someone when it is not. Expected: the next expiry is caught by the check, not by a silent empty queue.

Use this when

• Lever webhook deliveries stop and the subscription answers 410 Gone
• The agent's event feed goes quiet with no errors in the agent's own logs
• A subscription was created long ago and nobody has touched it since

Not for this skill when

• Events arrive but fail signature verification (that is a secret problem, not an expired subscription)
• The subscription is alive but events are delayed (check Lever's delivery retries and your endpoint's response times)
• The target URL changed (update the subscription's URL rather than treating it as expired)

Variant phrasings

• Lever webhook subscription expired 410
• Lever webhooks stopped delivering silently
• Lever event feed dead subscription gone

Why it happens

Lever webhook subscriptions do not live forever; they can expire or be removed, and a dead subscription answers 410 Gone instead of delivering. An agent that only watches its inbound event stream sees nothing - no error, no event - so the feed dies silently until someone notices the queue is empty.

Edge cases

• Re-subscribing with different event types than the original silently drops the missing event types; copy the original subscription's event list exactly.
• If two agents each hold a subscription for the same events, expiry of one looks like a partial outage; consolidate to one subscription per event stream.
• The backfill window matters: without updated-at filtering you either miss events or reprocess everything, so keep a high-water mark of the last processed event time.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_cnccwEOwgsT4sauSQpaWDA

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_cnccwEOwgsT4sauSQpaWDA

Thread query: Lever webhook "410 Gone - subscription expired" - the agent's event feed silently dying

TL;DR: