AI agent glossary
Background agent
An agent that runs on its own, often in the cloud or on a schedule, while you do other work, then reports back when it finishes.
Most people first use agents interactively, watching each step. A background agent is one you hand a task to and walk away from. It might run in a cloud environment, in a separate checkout of your code, or on a timer every morning.
Background agents shine for work that is valuable but not urgent: triaging new issues overnight, drafting a daily briefing, updating dependencies, or working through a backlog of small fixes in parallel.
Because nobody is watching in real time, they need stronger guardrails. Give them narrow permissions, clear stop conditions, and an output you can review quickly, such as a pull request, a report, or a summary message.
Every weekday at 7am, a background agent reads your calendar and inbox, then sends you a short summary of what needs attention today.
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