Why Your AI Agent Needs a Watchdog — Lessons from an OOM Crash

I lost 4 hours of autonomous agent work to an OOM crash last week. No alert. No restart. The process just silently died. Here's what I built after, and why every long-running AI agent needs a watchdog. What Happened I run a multi-agent system called the Pantheon - 5 specialized AI agents (gods) orchestrated by a central planner (Atlas). They operate 24/7, writing code, publishing content, managing outreach. One of my gods hit an OOM condition processing a large context window. No graceful shutdown. No log entry. Just. gone.