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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Handling long-running AI agents: timeouts, checkpoints and partial progress

#shipping #agenticai #reliability

An agentic task that plans, calls tools, and iterates over several minutes fails differently than a single request-response API call — and needs a different reliability model to match.

What to build in from the start

  • A hard overall timeout, so a stuck agent doesn't run indefinitely and silently consume budget.
  • Checkpointing progress after each meaningful step, so a failure partway through doesn't lose all prior work.
  • A way to resume from the last checkpoint rather than restarting the entire task from scratch after a transient failure.

The failure mode unique to agents

An agent can get stuck in a loop — repeating a failed tool call, or oscillating between two plans — without ever technically 'crashing'. Detect this with a step-count or repeated-action limit, not just a wall-clock timeout, since a looping agent can burn a lot of budget well within a generous time limit.

See agentic AI patterns: tools, memory, guardrails.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour speaking from the podium at VSICS, Kanpur
At the VSICS podium, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-11.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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