Everyone is rushing to build AI agents right now, but GenAI integration really just puts a stronger spotlight on solid system design and backend reliability. An AI agent relies entirely on the APIs and data pipelines underneath it. If your backend drops events or double-processes payments during a network blip, even the best agent will just execute a broken workflow faster. To build resilient systems, you need to see how they break. Reading Kafka documentation on fault tolerance helps, but intentionally introducing network chaos shows how the underlying mechanics actually behave.