# Agent rollback

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/rollback

> Agent rollback is the pattern of restoring an agent's state to a previous checkpoint when the current trajectory has gone wrong — letting it try a different approach without starting over.

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Agent rollback is the pattern of restoring an agent's state to a previous checkpoint when the current trajectory has gone wrong — letting it try a different approach without starting over.

Long agent loops occasionally make a wrong call that cascades into a dead-end. Rollback lets the orchestrator detect the dead-end (via no-progress detection, critic feedback, or explicit error) and restore the agent's state to a previous checkpoint — usually one made before the wrong call — and continue with a different action. Implementations vary: LangGraph's checkpointing + replay, custom state snapshots, transactional databases of agent state. Rollback is the difference between an agent that recovers and one that burns all its budget on a single failed path.

## When to use

- Long agent loops where a single wrong step cascades.
- Agents that interact with versioned external systems (filesystem, DB).

## Common mistakes

- Rolling back without a different strategy — the agent repeats the same mistake.
- No checkpointing strategy — there's nothing to roll back to.

## Related terms

- [agent-loop](https://promtable.com/glossary/agent-loop)
- [agent](https://promtable.com/glossary/agent)
- [self-correction](https://promtable.com/glossary/self-correction)
- [context-distillation](https://promtable.com/glossary/context-distillation)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
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Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/rollback
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