Building Reliable Webhook Receivers for AI Agents

Building Reliable Webhook Receivers for AI Agents Polling sucks. Every 10 seconds your agent asks "anything new?" and burns through API quota whether something happened or not. Webhooks flip the model: events push to your agent the moment they occur. Your agent responds instantly without wasting calls. But webhooks arrive unpredictably, sometimes fail, and can arrive twice. Here's how to handle them. Why Webhooks for Agents Your agent sits idle until an event fires. A user submits a form. A payment clears. An email arrives. Without webhooks, you poll every few seconds and pay for 99% empty responses. With webhooks, the event reaches your agent immediately. No lag. No wasted quota. Your agent reacts, not waits. Expose an Endpoint Start with a simple HTTP server. Here's Flask: from flask import Flask , request , jsonify app = Flask ( __name__ ) @app.route ( ' /webhook ' , methods = [ ' POST ' ]) def handle_webhook (): payload = request . get_json () # Process immediately? No. Return fast