Pydantic AI 1.85: Type-Safe Agents That Survive Crashes

Pydantic AI 1.85 landed last week with a simple promise: build AI agents that fail predictably and recover automatically. If you have ever watched a LangChain or CrewAI agent silently return a wrong-shaped dict at 3 a.m., this release is for you. Outputs are type-checked at runtime, transient model errors get retried with exponential backoff, and long-running workflows can be paused and resumed across crashes.

By the end of this guide you will have a working agent in roughly 50 lines of Python that returns a validated Order object, calls a typed tool, and survives a process restart mid-run. We will use OpenAI as the model provider, but Pydantic AI is model-agnostic, so the same code works with Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, or Bedrock by swapping one string.