Anthropic Workshop: Build Agents That Run for Hours — Ash Prabaker & Andrew Wilson

Nice meeting you guys . Um I'm Ash. Uh this is Andrew . We both work in uh as engineers in our applied AI uh team here at Anthropic . Um and the kind of topic for this session was uh inspired by a blog post we put out uh just a couple weeks ago actually about how to think about building uh agents that can actually run for really long extended periods of time . You know, we're talking 5 6 hour plus kind of runs . Uh I think we've all seen these kind of demos , you know, of like companies being like, "Hey, we've like one-shotted a browser." For example, but not necessarily sharing like some of the details into what goes into the harness and that's what we kind of want to talk about today . So, the first off um my amazing quick Andrew will talk about a , some of the primitives that we've shipped in code code um and, you know, where we are today . Um and then I'll hop back on stage to talk a little bit about some of the more experimental stuff that we're playing with with harnesses um as well as, you know, a few examples of of what we've seen . But, over to you. Sounds good. Thank you, Ash. And yeah, thanks everyone for joining uh first session of the AI Engineer conference. So, glad you're spending it with us . Uh my name's Andrew. I'm on the applied AI team based out of London working as a solution architect with a lot of our digital native and industries customers . So, um yeah, I'm going to give a little bit of a history tour uh trip down memory lane , but really with the focus on all the things that we've shipped that lead to agents being able to run uh for multiple hours or even days at a time . Um and then I'll hand over to Ash to do more of the the state of the art . Right. Okay, so um little quote from or on Twitter from Boris, the creator of Cloud Code . This was on the one-year anniversary of Cloud Code . Uh, basically saying a year ago, Cloud was struggling just to write bash commands and escaping strings . Um, and it could run for, you know, maybe 20 minutes at a time . And then, we're now at the point where almost all of Cloud Code is being written by Cloud Code , and it can run effectively for days at a time . Uh, so sort of a a big big swing over just the course of a year , and I'll walk through that history uh, a little bit now . But, just to Let me uh, zoom in here