Your AI Agent Crashed at Step 47. Now What?

Your agent is running a 50-step data pipeline. Extract, validate, transform, load. It's been working for 20 minutes. Step 47. OOM kill. Process gone. State gone. Now what? The State of Crash Recovery in 2026 LangGraph: "Did you configure PostgresSaver?" No? Start over. CrewAI: "Limited state management, failures typically require restart." Swarm: "No persistence, state exists only in memory." Raw Python: Hope you wrote checkpoint logic yourself. Every framework has its own answer to this. Most of them are "you should have thought about this earlier." The Checkpoint Tax If you want crash recovery in LangGraph, you write this: from langgraph.checkpoint.postgres import PostgresSaver DB_URI = "postgresql://user:pass@localhost/checkpoints" checkpointer = PostgresSaver.from_conn_string(DB_URI) graph = builder.compile(checkpointer=checkpointer) config = {"configurable": {"thread_id": job_id}} state = graph.get_state(config) if state and state.values: result = graph.invoke(None, config) # resu