Durable Execution for AI Agents

Durable execution means an AI agent can lose its process — a crash, a deploy, a killed container — and pick up exactly where it left off, without redoing work or repeating side effects. It's the single property that separates an agent you can put in front of paying customers from a demo that only works when nothing goes wrong.

Killed mid-approval, resumed at the exact step
Durable execution: an AI agent survives SIGKILL and resumes from the exact stepA run checkpoints to Postgres after every iteration. When the process is killed mid-approval, the run resumes from the exact step with no replay and no double-execution of tool calls.ckpt 1ckpt 2ckpt 3ckpt 4checkpoint every iteration → PostgresPAUSEDawaiting humanSIGKILLprocess diesrestart + approveresumes at ckpt 4resume replays STATEcompleted tool results stitched back innever replays EFFECTSno double refund · exactly-once via DB CAS
How agentFast makes execution durable

Checkpoint after every iteration

Full run state — messages, context, pending tool calls — is written to Postgres as an atomic upsert after each step.

Replays state, never effects

On resume, completed tool results are stitched back from the checkpoint. The agent never re-executes a tool it already ran.

Exactly-once side effects

Approved high-risk actions execute exactly once, enforced by a database compare-and-set — a retried worker can't double-charge.

Sibling-safety on suspend

When one of several batched tool calls needs approval, the non-gated siblings run first and persist; resume runs only the approved call.

It's a test, not a slide
The claim is verified the only way that counts: an automated test kills the process with a real SIGKILL, across two OS processes, against real Postgres, while a run is durably paused. It restarts, approves, and asserts the run resumes from the exact step — no replay. The same test passes on both a LangGraph graph and a hand-rolled vanilla loop.

Durable execution is what makes human-in-the-loop approval safe — a pause that only works while the server stays up isn't really a pause. It works on every SDK; start with LangGraph or read the deep dive on durable human-in-the-loop.

Stop rebuilding the plumbing.

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