Durable agents (long-running, pause/resume)
Agents that persist across time and failures — running for days or weeks, pausing during idle gaps (often human-in-the-loop), surviving crashes, and resuming with full context. The shift from stateless chatbot to production background process, and a distinct maturation axis of the agentic-coding-harness / agent-runtime landscape.
The core architectural move
Separate workflow state from conversation history. Instead of replaying chat to infer progress, durable agents use:
- Explicit state machines / checkpoints — named states the agent can’t skip or hallucinate past; current state injected into the prompt (adk-long-running-agents).
- Persistent session storage — every tool call durably written (e.g. ADK’s
DatabaseSessionService, SQLite/Cloud SQL), so a crash resumes from the last checkpoint. - Event-driven resumption — webhooks/events wake dormant agents and atomically apply a state transition before the next inference (no polling).
Where it shows up
- adk (adk-long-running-agents) — the deepest treatment: durable state machines + persistent sessions + webhook resume for multi-week workflows.
- agentsys, gstack — “state persists across sessions so interrupted work resumes.”
- OpenClaw (claude-code-channels-vs-openclaw) — the self-driven variant: a heartbeat daemon with built-in memory (durability via continuous autonomous operation rather than pause/resume).
- hermes-agent — persistent cross-session memory + hibernation between sessions (and it imports OpenClaw users’ memories); durability paired with self-improving-agents.
Why it matters
Durability is what makes agents usable for real business workflows (onboarding, disputes, multi-touch sequences) rather than single-session demos — and it’s a reliability discipline (checkpoints, atomic transitions) more than a model-capability question, echoing the agentic-coding-harness thesis that structure, not raw model power, unlocks production use.
Related
adk-long-running-agents · adk · agentic-coding-harness · agent-orchestration · claude-code-channels-vs-openclaw