Durable Execution: The Missing Primitive for Reliable AI Agents
AI agents can do more than answer questions. They can search the web, call APIs, write code, process documents, and ask a human for approval before taking an action. To complete a single task, an agent might perform dozens of these operations over several minutes, hours, or even days. But what happens if the process running the agent crashes halfway through a task? The usual answer is to start the task again. This may be acceptable for a chatbot generating a response, but it becomes a problem when the agent has already performed real-world actions. It may have sent an email, charged a card, created a support ticket, or received an approval from a human. Starting again could repeat those actions, while simply continuing requires us to know exactly where the agent stopped. ...