# Compensating Action

> Pair every irreversible-looking agent action with a compensating action that can undo or counteract it.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Safety & Control
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/compensating_action/

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## Description
**Intent**: Pair every irreversible-looking agent action with a compensating action that can undo or counteract it.
**Context**: An agent is executing a multi-step plan that writes to several systems in sequence — book a flight, then a hotel, then a car, or charge a card, then provision an account, then send a welcome email. Each step succeeds or fails independently, and the agent is operating across services that have no shared transactional boundary. Some of the early steps will have already landed in the real world by the time a later step fails.
**Solution**: For each forward action, define a compensating action (delete-after-create, refund-after-charge, archive-after-publish). On failure mid-plan, run compensators in reverse order to restore the prior state. Idempotent compensators.


## Use Cases
- Agent actions are irreversible-looking and distributed transactions are unavailable.
- For each forward action a meaningful undo (delete-after-create, refund-after-charge) can be defined.
- Compensators can be made idempotent so retrying them is safe.





## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Partial-failure consistency.

- Confidence to attempt multi-step writes.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Doubles the number of action implementations.

- Some actions cannot truly be compensated (sent emails, public posts).







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/compensating-action/)