Agent recovery starts with durable records of each step, including inputs, tool calls, responses, state transitions and external writes. That evidence lets the system determine what completed before a failure and what work remains uncertain.
Recovery may resume from a checkpoint, retry an idempotent operation or run a compensating action that reverses a prior side effect. Explicit recovery paths are safer than blindly restarting a multi-step workflow because some earlier actions may already have taken effect.
Acronyms and aliases
agent recovery variantAI agent recovery variant
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
What information is needed to recover an agent workflow?
The system needs durable step state, tool requests and responses, external writes, errors and identifiers that reveal what completed.
Why not restart a failed agent from the beginning?
Restarting can repeat irreversible or costly side effects unless prior operations are known to be idempotent.
