# Helping an agent finish longer tasks Some requests need several rounds of work. I designed and built the execution path that lets the agent delegate tasks, save its progress, and resume with the results. Rafi ยท September 16, 2026 Case study Source: https://halimrafi.com/work/helping-an-agent-finish-longer-tasks --- A model call has a fixed amount of context. A request does not. When the work needs more than one call, the agent has to be able to save its progress and pick the work up again. ## The request that failed Someone uploaded a spreadsheet of company rows and asked the agent to create a deal for each one. Splitting the file across helpers was the right move, and it was the part that broke. Each helper could be handed only a small amount of text, and only a few could be started in one turn, so the total that could be handed out was a fraction of the file. Every attempt was rejected for exceeding that limit. The agent fell back to working through the file in the same conversation, and our record ends there: it notes the fallback beginning, not whether it finished the job. The file's size was not the problem in itself: the limit on handing work out was far smaller than the work, and everything already done stayed in context and kept growing. Raising either limit moves the ceiling. ## What I did I wrote the design before the code, as an internal proposal opening with that failure, then authored the changes that landed it: a durable record of a run, the handing out of work, the machinery that resumes a run with results in hand, and the check that decides whether a run is finished. My co-founder One Chowdhury reviewed and approved each of those changes. On the front end I introduced the panel that shows a run working, and Yash Sehgal worked on it alongside me. Raonak and Tariqul Islam contributed to the module alongside their own work. The product is the team's. ## Delegating, saving progress, resuming When the agent hands work out, it writes down what it is doing and stops, so its turn ends instead of growing while it waits. The helpers run on their own, and what comes back is their results, not everything they did to get there. Resuming starts a new model call rather than continuing an open one, and the conversation so far is replayed into it with those results in place. The new call is not a blank slate: it carries the history. What it does not carry is the helpers' intermediate work, which is the part that used to accumulate. The helpers are deliberately read only. They gather and report. #### What is saved, what is replayed, what is shortened Saved between calls: the run itself, as a durable record of what it is doing and which helpers are outstanding; each helper's returned result; and an index of the load-bearing facts from each round, meaning the identifiers and outcomes a later round might need. The index is written today and not yet read back. Replayed into the next call: the conversation up to and including the message that handed the work out, rebuilt as messages, with the helpers' results in place. Each round writes a new message linked to the run, so persistence and replay logic stays per message while the reader still sees one continuous answer. Shortened: older tool results, and only those. Past a character budget they are replaced with a stub that names the tool and the call it belongs to, records how large the output was, and tells the model plainly that the data is gone and must not be reconstructed from memory. Where a tool saved its output under a handle, the stub keeps that handle and says how to fetch it again, so the drop is recoverable rather than a dead end. Reasoning and written text are never stubbed. The stub is a function of the part alone, so re-running the trimmer produces the same bytes and the prompt prefix stays stable. Before a run is allowed to finish, a check scores it on two things: whether it is converging on the goal rather than looping, and whether its answer is grounded in what the helpers actually returned. A run that is going nowhere is stopped and says so, rather than spending the remaining budget. Dead helpers, stuck resumes and runaway loops each have a reaper or a cap. #### What the helpers can and cannot do Helpers are resolved from the same tool set the main agent uses, and then every tool that changes data is removed before the model sees it. The code calls this read only by default and ships it strict, with delegating a write left as a future possibility rather than a current one. The main agent keeps its full tool set in every round, so a long run can still end in a change to a record. That change is made by the main agent, not by the delegated work. What is described here is how the work gets divided and resumed, not a system that edits records on its own. ## One decision, and what it costs On resume the conversation is replayed rather than summarised. The intended benefit is that the model keeps its own record of what it did and what came back, in the form it first saw it, so a later round reasons from the same material rather than a retelling. What a summary drops is decided in advance, before anyone knows which detail a later round will need. The cost is paid on every resume and grows with the run: the replayed history is charged again in tokens, and rebuilding it adds to the time before the model starts producing. Where the history must shed weight it sheds older tool output rather than the reasoning, keeping the account of the run while removing the bulk. That is a tradeoff between cost and the risk of having dropped something that mattered. It is not a guarantee of correctness, and I have no evaluation measuring how often either choice would have been wrong. #### How the shortening is tuned The budget is generous rather than tight, and larger again in the mode that keeps the prompt prefix stable for caching. In the deterministic mode, results in roughly the most recent thirty messages stay verbatim and only older ones rotate out, chosen so a full turn's tool loop plus some prior context survives untouched. The comment in the code calls that a tuning knob to validate during the rollout, which is a fair description of its status. ## Where this stands The work is implemented, merged, and deployed. It sits behind rollout gates opened per organisation and off by default in the repository, so whether any customer is using it is a separate question from whether it is deployed. #### How far each of those is established Three separate things. Implemented and merged: through pull requests reviewed and approved before they landed. Deployed: the service's production deploy workflow ran for a specific revision and its deploy step succeeded, publishing an image tagged with that revision, and the work is present in it. That is a deployment record identifying the code, not an inference from a branch name. What it does not show is the running system, which I cannot observe from here. Enabled for customers: not established. Two switches stand in front of the path. Both default to off in the repository, and a repository default is not a production value: the file that carries them is an example configuration, and the real one lives in an environment I cannot read from here. So I know the gates exist and I do not know their production setting. There are also no production measurements: no latency, reliability or adoption figures. The request described above is one documented incident, written down as the reason to start. It is not a benchmark, and there is no before and after attached to it, so nothing here claims an improvement it can show.