The Hidden Infrastructure Tax of Running Autonomous Agents 24/7
Picture the moment every agent builder eventually hits.
You've got a script working. It reads a task queue, calls an LLM, executes a few tool calls, writes some output, and loops. In a terminal window, on your laptop, it looks like magic. So you do the obvious thing: you let it keep running. You close the terminal tab but leave the process alive.
By morning, one of three things has happened.
The laptop went to sleep and the loop died silently three hours in, and you have no idea what state it left things in. Or it kept running, burned through a significant chunk of your API budget on a task it got stuck in a retry loop on, and nobody noticed until the bill showed up. Or, in the worse version of this story, the agent had shell and file access to the same machine that holds your SSH...
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