Duplicate Actions

The most common failure mode when agents operate without execution infrastructure. Network retries, race conditions, and concurrent agents can cause the same action to happen more than once: two emails sent, two tickets created, two payments processed. The Grid eliminates duplicates through idempotent operations and convergent state.

Naive retries are the cause, not the cure. When an action fails ambiguously — the request reached the server, the response did not reach the client — a retry without idempotency turns one intent into two outcomes. Covia's runtime treats every operation as keyed and idempotent: a retry of the same intent is recognised as the same action, and the second attempt either returns the first result or is rejected as a no-op. The retry succeeds without the action duplicating.