AltimateAI / AltimateAI/altimate-code

`webfetch`: high failure rate from invalid/broken URLs — consider pre-validation

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Description

## Problem

`webfetch` is the #1 failing tool by volume — 934 failures in a single day, accounting for 55% of all tool failures. Breakdown:

| Error | Count |
|-------|------:|
| HTTP 404 (Not Found) | 810 |
| HTTP 403 (Forbidden) | 52 |
| Invalid URL | 51 |
| HTTP 429 (Rate Limited) | 21 |

The model frequently generates URLs that don't exist (documentation pages, API endpoints, GitHub links with wrong paths). Each failed fetch wastes a tool call and the model often retries the same broken URL.

## Impact

- Inflates the overall failure rate (55% of all failures)
- Wastes tool calls and tokens on retries
- Degrades user experience when the agent keeps trying broken URLs

## Suggested improvements

1. **URL validation before fetch** — reject obviously malformed URLs at the tool level
2. **Cache 404s** — if a URL returned 404, don't retry the same URL in the same session
3. **Rate limit handling** — on 429, respect `Retry-After` header or back off automatically instead of reporting as a failure
4. **Consider reducing retry behavior** — if the model gets a 404, the error message should clearly state the URL doesn't exist so the model doesn't retry

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