Your AI Output Reached 90% and Suddenly Disconnected. How Do You Resume It?

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Your AI response is 90% complete when the page suddenly loses connection. After the user refreshes, should the content come back exactly as it was, continue generating from where it stopped, or restart from scratch?

This is a common problem in AI product engineering. It may sound as simple as “add reconnection support to SSE,” but a production-grade solution involves frontend caching, event replay, task scheduling, model inference state, and data consistency.

Typical failure scenarios include:

• The user’s network fluctuates and the SSE or WebSocket connection drops.
• The browser tab is closed, and reopening it only shows the previous conversation history.
• A long-running task is interrupted by autoscaling, instance restarts, or gateway timeouts.
• The user refreshes the page and expects already visible content to remain available.
• The client consumes output too slowly while the server keeps generating, causing buffers to grow indefinitely.

Streaming generation feels fast because users can see output immediately. But speed without reliability does not feel impressive. It feels like text that might disappear at any moment.