AI Systems Atlas

H-13Event-driven Agent

/harnesses/event-driven

The agent sleeps until an external event wakes it; its first decision is whether the event matters at all.

Step-by-step walkthrough5 steps
  1. The agent is asleep. Something happens in the world.
  2. The event wakes it with the payload as context.
  3. First decision: does this event matter?
  4. Relevant → act on it.
  5. Not relevant → ignore and go back to sleep. Cheap idleness is the point.
Key insight

Inverting control — the world calls the agent — is what makes always-on agents affordable and non-annoying.

Failure mode

Event storms: without dedupe and rate limits, a burst of correlated events becomes a burst of correlated, conflicting agent actions.

Further reading
RelatedLong-running agentCI feedback loop

Elsewhere in the atlas

Security →Evals →Context →Coding Agents →Tools →Ops →