Glossary term
Glossary term
Agentic Systems
Saved state of an agent's execution (memory, tool call history, intermediate results) enabling pause, resume, and fault recovery in long-running workflows.
LangGraph's checkpointing feature saves full agent state (graph node, messages, tool outputs) to a persistence backend (SQLite, PostgreSQL, Redis) after every step, enabling agents to resume multi-day research tasks after interruption.
OpenAI's Assistants API persists thread state across sessions as a form of agent checkpointing, allowing a code-debugging agent to resume a multi-hour session after the user disconnects and reconnects the next day.
A pharmaceutical research agent using Letta (MemGPT) checkpoints its state every 30 minutes during a multi-day literature-review task - if the server restarts, the agent resumes from the last checkpoint with no data loss.