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Canon

Vol. VIII · Production Systems · VIII.1

Durable Execution

Agents run longer than request timeouts. Checkpoint after every turn. Resume as a first-class API. LangGraph won production on this axis.

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langchain-ai/langgraphlangchain-ai/deepagentsmastra-ai/mastran8n-io/n8nhumanlayer/12-factor-agents

Doctrine

  • Every loop iteration is a transaction: persist context, then effect, then persist observation.
  • Idempotent tools, or exactly-once wrappers. Double refunds are not a prompt bug; they are a systems bug.
  • Time-travel is a debugger. Keep the event log.

The production differentiator

Comparisons in 2026 keep repeating: LangGraph for durable, stateful agents. Mastra for the TypeScript equivalent. n8n for the visual DAG. Factor 6 is the doctrine independent of vendor. If you cannot pause a refund mid-approval and resume tomorrow, you are not in production.

Anti-patterns

  • In-memory Python processes as the production runtime.
  • Fire-and-forget tool side effects with no journal.

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