Always-On Agents
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Always-on agents are systems whose future behavior depends on durable state built up across earlier interactions, and this 130-plus page survey argues that state is far more than memory. It spans task ledgers, permissions, credentials, commitments, provenance, triggers, and effects the agent has already committed to the outside world.
State as first-class, not just memory: The survey reframes agent state to include authority, obligations, and externally committed effects, the things that make a long-lived agent consequential rather than merely conversational.
Six axes per state item: Each piece of state is scored on authority, scope, mutability, provenance, recoverability, and actionability, giving builders a vocabulary for reasoning about what a stored fact can actually do.
A full state lifecycle: It traces state from write and retrieve through forget, audit, and rollback, surfacing the operational questions that production always-on systems must answer.
Why it matters: As agents move from single sessions to continuous operation, treating durable state as a governed, auditable resource is what separates a safe long-running system from one that quietly accumulates risk.
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