How do I choose between durable execution and retry logic for my AI agent?

Use durable execution when your agent has long-running, multi-step workflows that must survive infrastructure failures—it persists state and replays steps automatically. Simple retry logic works for short-lived, stateless calls. Durable execution does not replace retries; it complements them by providing a recovery framework. For example, if an LLM call times out, durable execution resets to the last checkpoint, but you still need retry logic for the call itself.