Background Agent

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

A background agent is the AI coworker that keeps working on your ticket after you've closed the laptop lid. You kick off a task, walk away, get coffee, do something else entirely, and come back to find a finished pull request waiting instead of a terminal you had to babysit the whole time.

Real Talk

A background agent is a coding agent that runs asynchronously in a remote or isolated environment, such as a cloud sandbox, a separate worktree, or a CI-style runner, rather than blocking on the developer's local terminal session. This lets multiple long-running tasks execute in parallel while the developer continues other work, checking in on progress rather than watching it live.

Show Me The Code

# kick off a task and keep working while it runs
$ agent run "migrate all class components to hooks" --background
Started background task bg-4471. Check progress: agent status bg-4471

When You'll Hear This

"I kicked off a background agent on the migration and kept working on the frontend." / "Check on the background agent, it's been running for twenty minutes."