Krentsel: Interruptible agent workflows will mirror OS-style background task management
Alex Krentsel · Exo: Harnesses should see their own code and logs — Alex Krentsel, UC Berekeley / Google Research · Aug 15, 2026 · at 31:39
Alex Krentsel, researcher and creator of Exo, explains how agent scaffolding needs to evolve to support real-time user interruption.
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“So the way that we're going to need to reinvent what that kind of interactive interruptible work looks like in the agent layer, which is separate from the work going on, I think in the, like in the model layer. And in this like interactive model space, but I think we'll look much more like a systems OSE thing where the same way that when you're working in your terminal, you want to start, start something, you maybe put it in a background or you open Tmux and you put it in a separate, in a pane on the side. I expect this will be an architecture decision of how you put tasks in the background and expose them to the agent as they're running.”
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