EVERYTHING AIAI engineering, made visual
Visual edition planned
Phase 15 · Lesson 12Learn1 h22 lessons in phase

Long-Running Background Agents: Durable Execution

Production long-horizon agents do not run in `while True`. Every LLM call becomes an activity with checkpoint, retry, and replay. Temporal's OpenAI Agents SDK integration went GA March 2026. Claude Code Routines (Anthropic) runs scheduled Claude Code invocations without a persistent local process. Sessions pause on human-input, survive deploys, and resume from the latest checkpoint keyed by `thread_id`. Behind the new ergonomics sits an old pattern — workflow orchestration — with one new input: LLM calls as non-deterministic activities that must be deterministically replayed on recovery.

Visual edition planned

This lesson isn’t interactive yet.

It is part of the curriculum and will get the same treatment as Phase 1 — a visual cover, hands-on labs, derivations with numeric checks and a quiz. Until then, the original lesson is the best place to read it:

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