AI Systems Atlas

H-14Long-running Agent

/harnesses/long-running

Work in bounded bursts, checkpoint durable state, sleep, and resume — for goals that outlive any single session.

Step-by-step walkthrough6 steps
  1. The goal outlives any single session.
  2. Work happens in bounded bursts.
  3. Progress is written to durable state — not just chat history.
  4. Then the agent sleeps. No tokens burn while waiting.
  5. On wake, state reloads and work resumes exactly where it stopped.
  6. Eventually: done. Survivability comes from the checkpoint, not the context window.
Key insight

The context window is not the state. Anything that must survive lives in the checkpoint; the window is just a working set.

Failure mode

Checkpoint drift: if the saved state and the real world diverge while the agent sleeps, it resumes confidently into a world that no longer exists.

Further reading
RelatedState machineContext compactionCheckpointingDurable execution

Elsewhere in the atlas

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