Long Running Agents

What the long-term task agent really lacks is not intelligence, but the handover, recovery and acceptance capabilities.

The failure of long-term task agents often does not stem from the model's inability to think, but from the system's failure to design 'handover, recovery, verification, and continuation' as first-class citizens. This article is based on Anthropic's discussion of long-running agent harness, extending my complete views on cross-session execution, state externalization, feature contract, smoke test, browser verification and multi-round execution structure. It also explains why a truly usable agent does not run for a long time at a time, but can catch it round after round.