diff --git a/surfsense_backend/app/automations/actions/agent_task/dependencies.py b/surfsense_backend/app/automations/actions/agent_task/dependencies.py
index 12273aa0f..79107cd65 100644
--- a/surfsense_backend/app/automations/actions/agent_task/dependencies.py
+++ b/surfsense_backend/app/automations/actions/agent_task/dependencies.py
@@ -5,17 +5,17 @@ from __future__ import annotations
 from dataclasses import dataclass
 from typing import Any
 
+from langgraph.checkpoint.memory import InMemorySaver
 from sqlalchemy.ext.asyncio import AsyncSession
 
 from app.tasks.chat.streaming.flows.shared.llm_bundle import load_llm_bundle
 from app.tasks.chat.streaming.flows.shared.pre_stream_setup import (
-    get_chat_checkpointer,
     setup_connector_and_firecrawl,
 )
 
 
 class DependencyError(Exception):
-    """An external dependency (LLM config, checkpointer, ...) refused to load."""
+    """An external dependency (LLM config, connector service, ...) refused to load."""
 
 
 @dataclass(frozen=True, slots=True)
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ async def build_dependencies(
     session: AsyncSession,
     search_space_id: int,
 ) -> AgentDependencies:
-    """Load the LLM bundle, connector service, and checkpointer for one invoke.
+    """Load the LLM bundle, connector service, and a per-invoke in-memory checkpointer.
 
     Uses the search space's default LLM config (``config_id=-1``). Per-step
     model overrides land in a future iteration alongside the ``model`` param.
@@ -48,7 +48,24 @@ async def build_dependencies(
     connector_service, firecrawl_api_key = await setup_connector_and_firecrawl(
         session, search_space_id=search_space_id
     )
-    checkpointer = await get_chat_checkpointer()
+    # Quick fix: use an in-memory checkpointer for automation runs.
+    #
+    # The shared Postgres checkpointer caches DB connections in a
+    # module-level pool. Each cached connection is bound to the asyncio
+    # loop that opened it. Celery throws away the loop after every task,
+    # so the pool ends up full of connections pointing to a dead loop,
+    # and the next Celery task (running on a fresh loop) can't use any
+    # of them — it hangs 30s and fails with
+    # `PoolTimeout: couldn't get a connection after 30.00 sec`.
+    #
+    # InMemorySaver has no cached connections, no loop binding — each
+    # Celery task creates one and drops it on exit.
+    #
+    # TODO(checkpointer): proper fix is to dispose the checkpointer
+    # pool around each Celery task in `run_async_celery_task`, the same
+    # way `_dispose_shared_db_engine` already does for the SQLAlchemy
+    # pool. Then this site can switch back to the shared checkpointer.
+    checkpointer = InMemorySaver()
     return AgentDependencies(
         llm=llm,
         agent_config=agent_config,