# AI Automation Design Cheat Sheet
_Triggers, idempotency and what to do when the model is wrong at 3am_
An automation runs without you. That single fact decides every design choice — above all what happens when a step fails unobserved.
> Difficulty: intermediate  
> Version: 1.0  
> Updated: 2026-01-14  
> Categories: AI Automation  
> Tags: Function Calling, Json Mode

Source: https://invitationbuddy.com/cheat-sheet/ai-automation-design-cheat-sheet

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## Triggers
| Trigger | Fires on | Watch for |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Schedule | A clock  Overlapping runs when one is slow |
| Webhook | An external event  Duplicate deliveries — they are guaranteed, not rare |
| Polling | A change you detect yourself  Missing changes between polls |
| Queue | A message  Poison messages retried forever |
| Manual | A person  The only one where someone is watching |

## Non-negotiables
- [ ] An idempotency key on every side effect — Retries are certain; double-charging must not be
- [ ] Exponential backoff with jitter — Fixed retries turn one outage into a synchronised stampede
- [ ] A dead-letter path — Something must catch what fails every retry, or it is simply lost
- [ ] Validate model output BEFORE the side effect — The schema check is what stands between a bad parse and a sent email
- [ ] A confidence threshold that routes to a human — Low confidence should queue for review, not proceed quietly
- [ ] Alert on silence, not only on errors — A workflow that stopped triggering raises no error at all
- [ ] Log the prompt, the response and the version — Without them a wrong output cannot be reproduced

## FAQs
**What is the most commonly skipped safeguard?**
Alerting on silence. Every team alerts on errors; far fewer notice when a workflow simply stopped triggering, which raises no error at all.

**Do I really need idempotency keys?**
Yes. Webhooks are delivered more than once by design and retries are certain, so every side effect must be safe to attempt twice.

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_Generated from https://invitationbuddy.com/cheat-sheet/ai-automation-design-cheat-sheet_