Briefle
LearnGlossaryPricing

Briefle words · Code & architecture

Exponential backoff

Waiting longer after each failed attempt, typically doubling the delay, to give a struggling service time to recover.

Say it to an AI

Python send_sms(to, body, key) that retries up to 5 times with exponential backoff and jitter (1s, 2s, 4s…), honoring Retry-After on 429 (capped at 30s), but only for transient errors: HTTP 429, 5xx, timeouts and connection errors. Send the same idempotency key on every attempt so a retry can't double-send. Re-raise any other 4xx error immediately.

How an expert would brief the stronger version of “SMS retry loop”.

See it

Try it as a puzzle →

Pull request adding retries to the function that sends appointment reminder texts through an SMS provider's API.

Study A · the weaker one
Study B · the stronger one

Why: B sleeps 2 ** attempt seconds (1, 2, 4, 8) between attempts, and min(..., 30) also caps a long Retry-After. A always sleeps exactly 1 second, so it never gives a struggling provider more time to recover.

Related words

  • Edge case
  • Guard clause
  • Swallowed exception
  • Fail fast
  • Side effect
  • Log level
  • Custom error class
  • instanceof check

Room 4 · Errors & edge cases

Learn “Exponential backoff” in a five-minute lesson

Start free
AI can build almost anything. The bottleneck is saying what you want.
WordsPricingTermsPrivacyRefundsContact
© 2026 Briefle