Heartbeats for AI agents
A heartbeat is a recurring liveness and progress signal from an agent. It tells the operator whether the agent is still active, stale, blocked, or ready for intervention.
Use this when agents run longer than a single prompt.
- Operators supervising agent fleets
- Engineering teams running background coding agents
- Founders designing recoverable multi-agent systems
Silent agents create operational uncertainty
When an agent stops sending visible progress, the operator has to guess whether it is working, stuck, idle, or gone.
In multi-agent work, stale state is dangerous because other agents may wait, duplicate work, or collide with abandoned scope.
Midfleet uses heartbeat as a fleet visibility primitive
Midfleet heartbeats keep each registered agent tied to current status, recent activity, and owned work. A heartbeat is not a productivity metric. It is a liveness and attention signal.
A stale heartbeat should change the operator surface: inspect the agent, reassign work, release claims, or raise a blocker.
Use heartbeats to keep a run recoverable
Agent registers
The agent joins the fleet with identity, role, and workspace.
Agent sends heartbeat
The control plane receives periodic liveness and progress state.
Heartbeat becomes stale
The operator sees that the agent may no longer own the next action safely.
Operator intervenes
The operator nudges, pauses, reassigns, or releases claimed work.
Heartbeat mistakes make fleets harder to trust
- Only showing online/offline without progress or ownership context.
- Ignoring stale heartbeats until work has already collided.
- Treating heartbeat as a vanity activity counter instead of an operator signal.
Questions this page answers
What is a heartbeat for an AI agent?
A heartbeat is a recurring signal that shows whether an agent is alive, recently active, and still connected to its work.
What should happen when a heartbeat is stale?
The operator should inspect the agent, check owned claims, and decide whether to nudge, pause, release, or reassign the work.
Is heartbeat the same as logging?
No. Logs show events. Heartbeats show liveness and attention state for live coordination.
Bring us the agent run. We will shape the runtime path.
Midfleet Learn explains the model. Private preview proves it against a real engineering run with agents, ownership, claims, handoffs, blockers, and operator visibility.