Stateful AI agents that plan and execute multi-step tasks using tools: database queries, external API calls, code execution, file operations, and web search. Built with LangGraph for reliable state management across a workflow that might span 5-20 tool calls with branching logic depending on what each step returns. LangGraph's checkpointing persists agent state after every step so an agent interrupted by a timeout or error can resume from the last checkpoint rather than restarting from the beginning, critical for long-running agentic workflows.
The agent receives a goal, reasons about which steps are required, calls tools in the right sequence, and adjusts its plan when a tool returns an unexpected result or fails. Guardrails prevent the failure modes that make agents unreliable in production: maximum step counts that halt agents caught in retry loops (bounded planning), permission scoping that ensures the agent can only call the tools it has been authorised to use for this task, confirmation requirements before destructive or external-communication actions (sending an email, updating a database record), and unrecoverable state detection that surfaces an escalation to the human operator rather than silently failing. Every tool call is logged with inputs, outputs, and latency for debugging and compliance audit. Multi-agent architectures (supervisor + worker agents) for tasks that benefit from parallelisation: a research agent that dispatches 5 simultaneous sub-agents each investigating a different source and synthesises their outputs is faster than a single agent investigating serially.