core practice · system design prompt
Design exercise: Long-running & Scheduled Agents
Cron triggers, queues, leases, heartbeats, deadlines, cancellation, checkpoints, notifications, and cost budgets. Implement designOutline() returning non-empty values for: trigger, leaseHeartbeat, budget. Each value must name a concrete mechanism or decision.
The mechanism
Long-running agents are jobs with model decisions inside. They still need ownership, schedules, leases, cancellation, deadlines, observability, and bounded spend.
Expected evidence
A design outline with trigger, leaseHeartbeat, budget plus an explicit failure mode or trade-off.
Try this drill in the practice workspace →
Hints when you need them
- Name the failure mode before selecting the mechanism.