API timeouts and retries when your app calls AI backends you own

UpdatedSeptember 20, 2026

When your owned app calls a model or AI HTTP API, the client timeout budget and retry policy live in your code — not in a sandbox dashboard. Sandbox builders (Lovable, Bolt, and similar) often hide connect/read latency behind a platform proxy; once the same feature ships from your repo, every hung /v1/chat call can pin a worker, cascade into user-facing stalls, or silently burn tokens on duplicate POSTs. The production answer is explicit: set connect and total timeouts, classify which failures are retryable, back off with jitter, and attach an idempotency key when you retry a POST.

This post is about outbound HTTP from your service to an AI backend you configure with $AI_API_BASE.

This is an excerpt. Read the full post at otf-kit.dev/blog/api-timeouts-retries-ai-backends — full-stack kits your AI coding agent can actually ship to production. Browse the kits →

#architecture #backend #agents

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