Cloud Agent Lessons
11 hours ago
- #cloud-agents
- #reliability
- #development-environment
- Cloud agents evolved from simple extensions of local agents to independent VMs with their own environments, enabling parallel, unattended, and long-running tasks.
- A full development environment is critical for cloud agent output quality, requiring infrastructure like user tools, VM hibernation, and pipelines for checkpointing and restoring images.
- Cloud agents face reliability challenges due to disruptions like inference outages; using Temporal for durable execution improved reliability and now handles millions of actions daily.
- Decoupling agent loops, machine state, and conversation state allows flexible deployment across different pods, with efficient storage for streaming updates and handling retries.
- The harness for cloud agents shifted from tightly controlling behavior to giving agents more autonomy via tools, adapting as models got smarter, while still providing scaffolding for complex tasks.
- Future focus includes self-healing environments where agents can report and fix issues like missing secrets or network blocks, aiming to reduce manual intervention.