How do you design state and checkpointing for an agent that runs for an hour and might crash?
An hour-long agent run is a distributed workflow wearing an LLM hat. The signal is designing serializable state with step-level checkpoints, and knowing why resume is easy while replaying a side effect is not.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
An hour-long agent run is a distributed workflow wearing an LLM hat. The signal is designing serializable state with step-level checkpoints, and knowing why resume is easy while replaying a side effect is not.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
