Live-agent lifecycle

What makes an agent endpoint a persistent being rather than a disposable session: identity that survives resets, a working memory that follows it across machines, and graceful endings that never lose context.

The pieces

• Perch — the durable seat (identity, spool, state). Sessions attach to it (api bind/listen), reset across it (api boundary), and end without destroying it (api session-end).
• The mind, in two tiers — a live tier (who the agent is, what it’s doing) that follows the endpoint everywhere, and a project tier scoped to one project. Both are versioned, tracked storage, synced to paired machines with the same scoping.
• Commune — the agent drops <id>-commune.md into the adapter’s watched directory; spt-core ingests the delta into the right tier. A file-drop, not a command — any harness that can write a file can commune.
• Signoff — the graceful ending: final commune, then teardown (spt shutdown / api shutdown). The echo-commune fires before teardown, always.
• Echo-commune — sessions that end without a signoff don’t lose their delta: spt-core runs the adapter’s bounded summarizer template over the session history and ingests the result. The echo gate sentinel (armed on idle, cleared by graceful signoff) is what marks the need.
• Psyche — the endpoint’s persistent-context companion process, spawned/resumed from the adapter’s psyche_init/psyche_resume templates.

Rest and wake

Endpoints rest instead of dying: dormant (warm — zero idle compute, instantly wakeable) or suspended (cold), explicitly via spt suspend or on attention-shift. Resting instances stay addressable; deferred messages are held and released exactly once on wake (spt wake). Every active→resting edge fires a transition echo so the final context delta lands before the lights go out.

Commands

spt shutdown · suspend · wake · the api lifecycle calls (reference).

Deeper tutorial coming with the docs’ next tier; the contract above is complete and current.