An agent occasionally executes steps out of order after retry. How would you design idempotent recovery?

Instruction: Explain how you would recover safely when retries reorder agent actions.

Context: Tests how the candidate diagnoses the problem, chooses the safest next step, and reasons through recovery. Explain how you would recover safely when retries reorder agent actions.

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I would model each step with explicit preconditions, completion markers, and replay-safe identifiers. That way a retry can ask what has already committed instead of blindly re-running the workflow from a fuzzy point in time.

I also want sequencing encoded in state, not only implied...

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