LangGraph for Stateful AI Agents: When Your Claude App Needs a State Machine

Most Claude integrations follow the same pattern: user sends message, LLM responds, done. That works until your agent needs to: Pause mid-task and wait for human approval Branch into parallel sub-tasks Recover from a failed tool call without restarting Remember what it decided 12 steps ago This is where LangGraph comes in. It's a state machine framework for LLM agents — and it solves a genuinely hard problem. The Problem With Linear Agent Chains Consider a research agent that: Searches the web R