Agents don't fail at the starting line

Long-running software agents should be designed for expected mid-process failures rather than treated like short-lived requests, using orchestration that stores state outside a single process and resumes work through durable, checkpointed steps. The article argues that execution environments for agent-generated code should be integrated with orchestration and tracing so sandbox activity, retries, and failures can be observed in one place, while the underlying orchestration layer remains stable even as models, prompts, and providers change. It also recommends centralized controls for concurrency and throttling, including tenant-specific limits, to prevent simultaneous runs from overwhelming model providers and causing cascading retries. By saving completed step results, retrying only failed tasks, and pausing safely for human approvals or other events, agents can avoid repeating expensive model calls, duplicate side effects, and lost progress after crashes. The author presents Inngest’s durable steps, sandbox integrations, flow controls, tracing, and evaluation tools as mechanisms for building, monitoring, and improving such resilient workflows.

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