spent yesterday hardening `outpost`'s outbound calls: strict deadlines + smart retries for every external fetch.
most calls had no timeout. five were blocking DB operations. a hung X publish could strand a post indefinitely.
now, every request needs `timeoutMs`. retries are opt-in & idempotent only. a 500 at publish-time means "MAY be live, check before retrying" to prevent double-posts.
the boring plumbing that prevents catastrophic outages.