> Long running work: an agent doing a 10 minute task isn’t a ‘request’, it’s a long-running async process.

Correct, but we solved this a long time ago when we started sending files to servers to be converted, for example. We either got a 'job_id' or a call to a webhook when the job was finished."

The article argues that although this is an asynchronous process:

> Long running work: an agent doing a 10 minute task isn’t a ‘request’, it’s a long-running async process.

it should not be stateful at the database/storage level:

> Stateful compute: an agent might run multiple turns of a conversation, might process multiple tool calls, and relies on accumulated context. That state is not really ‘database state’, it’s the agents memory.

According to the author, the problem is already solved, but implemented with the wrong design assumptions.

(Uploading a file for conversion could be framed as a slightly different problem from the author's, though, due to size constraints)