What does it mean for an AI agent to 'work while you sleep'?

Anthropic's Jess Yan describes it as agents evolving from single-turn prompting loops into autonomous, self-discovering, long-running actors — you set them tasks overnight, then wake up to a resolved backlog and squashed bugs, without watching each step.

Can AI agents really run unattended in the background?

Yes — at an AI Engineer workshop, Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK team asked builders directly whether they had agents running in the background doing work while they sat in the room, treating unattended background execution as an expected, current capability rather than a future one.

How autonomous are today's coding and workflow agents?

Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar describes the current state plainly: agents are working 'very, very autonomously' — a marked shift from earlier agent designs that needed a human to approve or trigger nearly every step.

Agents That Work While You Sleep: Autonomous AI Agents

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Inside Anthropic's Bet on Claude Agents that Work While You Sleep | Jess Yan

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