Cron + Send-to-Self
Two ways agents schedule future work without keeping a process alive:
- Cron wakes an agent on a recurring schedule.
- Send-to-self sleeps now, continues later.
Signals
Send SIGINT to a running agent. Pause it. Resume it. Kill it.
Agents aren't opaque processes. They have a control plane.
Your agent sleeps at zero compute. A row changes in Postgres. The agent wakes.
No polling. No long-running process. Just a sync trigger.
Fork an agent from any point in its history.
Same context, different path. The original stays intact. The fork gets its own stream.
Spawn a child agent in 5 lines. It gets its own durable stream, its own URL, and wakes the parent when it finishes.
No shared memory. No process coupling. Just streams.
Electric Agents 0.6 is out!
0.6 rounds out what we launched in May:
• Long-lived entities with StreamDB state
• Spawn, fork, send, wake, signal, schedule
• Local and remote agent runners
• Desktop + mobile apps built on core APIs
• PG sync triggers, MCP servers, webhook sources
The ecosystem is converging on our thesis: the agent is the log. Electric Agents paints the picture for what is built on top.