Proactive agents
A proactive agent is defined by the direction of the first move. The prompt loop has you starting it. A proactive agent “doesn’t wait for you to work. It works for you, then waits” (2026-10-12-youtube-indydevdan-pi-durable, 3:13). The demo shape: jev classifies an incoming log stream, an incident classification triggers a detached pi session on an agent machine, the agent runs the on-call standard operating procedure (detect, investigate, root-cause, fix), and parks at ready-for-review with the tool calls visible. The human arrives, reads one diff, approves or declines. The claim riding on it: “most agents will be proactive” (5:33), and his proposed KPI at 34:12 states the economics: how many agents are doing useful work for you at any point in time, not how many you kicked off today.
Three things have to be true before this is safe, and the pattern names them.
- Something cheap and typed in front of the event stream, deciding what deserves an agent at all. Jev at fractions of a cent per classification fills that slot; triage by a frontier model would make the loop too expensive to leave running. See system-one-models, structured-outputs.
- The agent must survive nobody watching it, which is the job of durable-agents. An incident agent that dies with a laptop lid is worse than no agent, because the review queue silently empties.
- Irreversible actions must be gated and single-fire: the deploy tool non-replayable, the approval held by a human. See verifiability-and-one-way-doors, trust-ladder-agents.
The posture this produces is human-near-the-loop, which is also its honest weakness. In the demo the human adds a redundant check (“I added basically another safety check that was completely redundant”, 28:15), and the demo product is explicitly a mock with simulated events (13:57). Filing the pattern, flagging the proof. Compare Poteto’s two loops, where the outer loop pulls context in from the outside world; a proactive agent is what the outer loop looks like when it decides on its own that it is time to act. See inner-outer-loop-agents.
Sources
- Transcript:
Inbox/2026-10-12-pi-durable-proactive-agents-DNDYYHsypZg-transcript.txt - Earendil, “Pi Durable”, 2026-10-01: https://earendil.com/posts/pi-durable/