Founder disclosure up front: I'm building this. No pitch below, just the failure pattern and what I'm trying to do about it, and I'd like the ops people here to tell me if it's a real problem or a founder's imaginary one.
The thing that actually goes wrong
Your automation runs. The step that creates the ticket, adds the contact, sends the email, or bills the customer times out. Your workflow tool sees a failure and does what it's supposed to do: it retries.
Except the first one worked. The email went out. The ticket exists. The retry sends a second one.
Nobody gets an alert, because nothing actually errored — the retry succeeded. You find out two weeks later when a customer says "why did I get this twice," or an accountant asks why there are two line items, or a rep says "this contact has duplicates and I can't merge them." By then it's in your CRM, your inbox, and sometimes your invoices.
Why the usual fix doesn't hold
The fix everyone reaches for is a prompt line: "don't send duplicates." That doesn't work, because the AI genuinely believes the first attempt failed — the only thing it was told is "timeout." It's not being sloppy. It's working from bad information.
The other fix is the workflow tool's own retry settings. Those retry the step. The problem is that the step doesn't know whether the thing it talks to already did the work, because most of the systems we plug into — ticketing, CRM, email, billing — don't hand back a clean "already done" when you ask twice.
What I'm building
Shrimp keeps an execution ledger. In plain terms: every action your automation takes gets one line written before it goes out, keyed to what the action is for — not to the individual attempt.
· If the outcome comes back clean, the line closes as done.
· If the outcome is unclear, the line stays open. Not failed. Open. That distinction is the whole product.
· While a line is open, the retry is refused. You don't get a second email, a second ticket, a second charge.
· Someone gets told, with the evidence attached, so they can say "it went through" or "it didn't" and close the line.
The point isn't that I've invented logging. The point is that the log decides whether your automation is allowed to try again. Your current logs are read-only. This one is in the way.
What it is not
· Not a workflow tool. Keep n8n, Zapier, Make, Temporal, whatever you're on.
· Not a duplicate-call blocker. Deduplex and SafeAgent already do that, cheaply, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
· Not a magic layer that knows your business logic. If you've built something bizarre, it will need configuration.
Honest status
Pre-launch. I've talked to a handful of teams who've had this exact thing happen, and I'm trying to find out whether anyone would pay to stop it or whether it's a shrug-and-apologise problem. Pricing is genuinely unresolved — I'd rather hear what you'd expect to pay than invent a number.
What I want from this sub
If this has happened to you — what broke? Duplicate emails, duplicate invoices, duplicate contacts, something else? I'm collecting the ugly ones.
Would you have caught it from your own logs, or did you only find out from the customer?
Does "the ledger refuses the retry" sound reassuring or terrifying? I genuinely don't know. The terrifying answer might be the more useful one.
If it's a shrug-and-apologise problem, say that and I'll go build something else. Comments are open, DMs are open.
