/ax-audit

Long-running agent with no checkpoint/resume

Agent runs a multi-step task with no durability. Browser closes, network drops, session times out, all progress lost. User starts from scratch. Violates Improvement Over Time: completed work should survive interruption.

What goes wrong

User asks the agent to refactor 15 files. Agent completes 12 over 4 minutes. Laptop sleeps. On reconnect the session is gone, with no record of what was done. Agent redoes all 15, possibly making different choices.

Detection

Surfaces: agent-dashboard

Static signals:

1. Find execution loops or multi-step task handlers.
2. Check whether they persist state between iterations.
3. Check whether resume/recovery logic exists.
4. Flag multi-step agents with no checkpoint writes.

Runtime signals: Agent runs >60s with no state persistence. Reconnect restarts from scratch.

Judgment signals:

• A client resumeStream (AI SDK 7) resumes only if the server kept the run; a Claude Agent SDK PreToolUse hook returning defer persists the session across an approval wait. Either is a pass only when the server side is there; a reconnect helper over a run that died with the request is not.

Concrete commands:

rg '(for\s*\(|while\s*\(|for await)' --type=ts -A 5 src/ | rg -B 1 '(toolCall|executeStep|runTool)'
rg '(checkpoint|saveState|persistSession|saveProgress)' --type=ts src/
rg '(resume|recover|restoreSession|loadCheckpoint|resumeStream|defer)' --type=ts src/

False-positive guards:

• Skip files with // ax-audit-ignore:context-no-checkpoint-resume.
• Skip single-step agents (no loop, single tool call).
• Skip agents reliably under 10 seconds.
• Skip test files and fixtures.

Fix

// before
async function refactorFiles(files: string[]) {
  for (const file of files) await agent.refactor(file);
}

// after: checkpoint after each step, resume on reconnect
async function refactorFiles(sessionId: string, files: string[]) {
  const cp = await loadCheckpoint(sessionId);
  const done = new Set(cp?.completed ?? []);
  for (const file of files) {
    if (done.has(file)) continue;
    await agent.refactor(file);
    done.add(file);
    await saveCheckpoint(sessionId, { completed: [...done], updatedAt: Date.now() });
  }
}

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: backlog

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails): for (const t of tasks) await agent.execute(t): tab closes at task 8, all lost.

Applied (passes): Loop resumes from loadCheckpoint(id) index, calls saveCheckpoint after each step.

Suppression

// ax-audit-ignore:context-no-checkpoint-resume, sub-second operation
await agent.formatSingleFile(filePath);