Anthropic Solves Long-Horizon Tasks Like a Human Engineer
Anthropic’s dual-agent SDK keeps Claude on track across days-long coding jobs via Git+progress.txt checkpoints.
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As AI Agent capabilities improve, developers are increasingly asking them to tackle complex tasks spanning hours or even days. However, maintaining consistent progress across multiple context windows remains an unsolved challenge.
The Core Challenge of Long-Running Agents
The fundamental challenge facing long-running Agents is that they must work in “Sessions,” with each new session starting like a new engineer taking over with no memory of past work.
Due to limited context windows and the impossibility of completing complex projects within a single window, Agents need a mechanism to bridge the gap between coding sessions.
Anthropic’s Solution: Dual-Agent Architecture
By observing how human engineers work, Anthropic’s engineering team developed a two-part solution for the Claude Agent SDK: Initializer Agent and Coding Agent
Core Challenge: Context Compression Isn’t Enough
The Claude Agent SDK is a general-purpose Agent framework with context management capabilities (such as compression) that should theoretically allow Agents to work indefinitely.
However, in practical testing (for example, asking the latest Opus 4.5 to build a clone of claude.ai), context compression alone proved insufficient. Claude exhibited two main failure modes: