Crash-proof your AI coding sessions: why session restore matters

The terminal was never designed to run a fleet. It was designed to run one interactive program in the foreground. We've bent it into a control panel for many AI agents, and it mostly works — until something crashes.

When you're running one session, a crash costs you one restart. When you're running eight, a crash or an accidental machine restart can wipe eight in-flight contexts at once: the branches, the working directories, the half-finished trains of thought. That's the moment people lose an afternoon.

What "context" actually means here

Each agent session carries state you can't easily reconstruct:

• Where it is — the repo, the branch, the working directory.
• What it knows — the conversation so far, the decisions made, the files it's been reasoning about.
• What it was doing — the task in flight when the lights went out.

Restarting a session from scratch loses all three. You re-explain, re-orient, and re-establish trust in the output.

Session restore, done right

The fleet equivalent of claude --resume is a system that, on relaunch, brings every panel back:

• in its own folder, so working directories aren't scrambled,
• resuming its own session, so the conversation and context continue,
• laid out the same way, so your muscle memory still works.

This is a core reason we built restore into Agent Tile: at fleet scale, "just start over" isn't a recovery plan, it's a tax you pay every time anything hiccups.

How to stay recoverable regardless of tool

• One directory per session. If each agent owns a clean folder or git worktree, recovery is deterministic — you know exactly where each one belongs.
• Commit early, commit often. A crash is far cheaper when the last good state is already on a branch.
• Prefer resumable sessions over ephemeral ones. If your setup can reattach to a session by id, use it. If it can't, that's the first thing to fix.
• Assume restarts. OS updates, low-memory kills, and stray unplugs happen. Design for the restart you didn't choose.

Durability is the least glamorous of the three fleet problems — identity, broadcast, durability — and the one you notice only when it's missing. The first time a crash doesn't cost you your context, you stop thinking about it, which is exactly the point.