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[FEATURE]: Let agents wait and automatically continue a session #53960
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Thanks for the detailed write-up! You're asking for a supported way to tell an agent "continue in two hours" and have it reliably pick the same session back up on its own. The pending wait would be visible and cancellable, wouldn't need model calls to stay alive, and if it can't resume after a shutdown or restart it would say so instead of silently disappearing. Maintainers will consider it.
The failure you ran into is a known bug: background shells get killed when a project's services are shut down for inactivity after 60 minutes, and the completion notification is lost. It's tracked in #51828, and PRs #52580 and #51827 propose fixes. Those would make the background
sleepapproach work across the idle period, but a dedicated, visible and cancellable wait is a separate request, so I'm keeping this one open as a feature request.Related issues:
- [Bug] Location inactivity eviction SIGTERMs live background shells after 60 minutes #51828: the idle-shutdown bug that killed your
sleep 7200and dropped the completion notification - [FEATURE]: heartbeat tool in v2, structured use case of background shell #50045: request for a dedicated non-blocking timer/heartbeat tool instead of
sleepin a background shell - [FEATURE]: /schedule — run recurring background tasks (cron-like routines) #41906: recurring
/schedulejobs (cron-like), the recurring version of this - [FEATURE]: A delayed prompt send feature for pre-scheduling a prompt to send #35653: delayed prompt you schedule yourself (closed, not planned)
- [FEATURE]: Sleep tool for agents to wait without holding a shell process #20486, feat: sleep tool and autonomous tick loop #20874, [FEATURE]: scheduled tasks support #25395: earlier sleep/tick/scheduling requests you already linked
- [Bug] Location inactivity eviction SIGTERMs live background shells after 60 minutes #51828: the idle-shutdown bug that killed your
Feature hasn't been suggested before.
Describe the enhancement you want to request
I'd like a supported way for agents to wait and then continue the same session automatically, without needing another user message.
My use case was simple: "wait two hours before starting this task." On V2.0.24, the agent launched a background
sleep 7200and said it would resume automatically. About an hour later, OpenCode evicted the project's services for inactivity. The background shell disappeared, no completion notification arrived, and the session never continued. Its persisted background-job marker was stillrunning.The relevant idle-cleanup and notification lifecycle code is unchanged in V2.0.25 and
v2at a67cf4c. This was observed once; the version comparison was source inspection, not a reproduction on V2.0.25.I'm not specifically asking to increase the internal inactivity limit or prescribing a sleep tool, scheduler, or API. The capability I want is to tell an agent "continue in two hours" and trust that it will do so. It would also help with delayed retries and checking CI or PR reviews later.
An intentional wait shouldn't be mistaken for abandoned work or require repeated model calls just to stay alive. The pending wait should be visible and cancellable. Behavior across service shutdown/restart should be explicit; if a wait cannot resume, it should report that rather than silently disappear.
Related closed requests: #20486 (short sleep tool), #20874 (sleep/autonomous tick loop), and #25395 (scheduled tasks). This is about an agent's one-off continuation in an existing V2 session, not necessarily recurring jobs or manual pause/resume.
Environment: release/latest V2.0.24, Linux x86_64 (kernel 7.0.0-34-generic), Bash, TERM=xterm-256color. Terminal application unavailable. One custom plugin was active:
visible-session-tabs.server.