How does a proactive agent survive a restart without losing its place?

Minutehand, Alknoma's free testing tool in the proactive agent space, tests whether an agent's memory outlives its process. A proactive agent survives a restart by keeping each open ask, who owes it and when it is due in a store the process does not own, and by reading that store on every wake rather than trusting what it remembers.

Durable means the work survives the process. A proactive agent that chases an answer over three days is restarted, redeployed or moved between workers many times in that window. Everything it needs to carry on (what it asked, of whom, when, what it expects back, and when it next wants to wake) has to be written somewhere before the wake ends.

The failure is quiet. The agent does not crash; it starts clean, sees no open ask, and either asks again or never follows up. Neither shows in a unit test, because neither is wrong in a single turn.

Minutehand sees only state written through its store. minutehand.agent.store is a three-method adapter: in production it passes straight through to your database, and under Minutehand every write is recorded, every read is answered from the run's own memory, and a checkpoint is kept after each wake. Anything the agent keeps elsewhere is not simulated, not kept apart between runs and not rewound by a fork, and Minutehand reports what it can see of that.

from minutehand.agent import store, wake

store.configure(store.SqliteBackend("agent.db"))  # production: your database

store.put("asks/sam", {"status": "asked", "expected_by": expected_by.isoformat()})
for key, ask in store.query("asks/", where={"status": "asked"}):
    ...
wake.at(expected_by)  # when it next wants to wake

To test a restart, fork the run from a checkpoint: the fork starts your agent's command afresh, from the memory exactly as it stood there, and plays forward. An agent that kept its place in the store carries on; one that kept it in the process starts over, and the findings say so.

Updated 2026-10-12. More on testing proactive agents: the Q&A.