The Agentic Builders / New to Agents · 5 of 14
What is a Session
· 3 min read
New to Agents · Beginner Path · 5 of 14
A session is one continuous run of an agent - one sitting at the desk, from "good morning" to "wiped blank."
Here's the shape of it. At the start, the agent loads what it needs into the context window: its instructions, your request, the files it reads. During the session, you work together and that window fills up. At the end - you close it, or it hits its limit - the window is wiped and the session is over.
The important part is what happens next time. When you come back, that is a brand-new session: a fresh window, a clean desk, a brilliant stranger again. Nothing carries over on its own. The only thing that crosses from one session to the next is what got written down before the first one ended and read back when the next one started.
So a session is the unit of an agent's working life. Everything the agent ever "experiences" happens inside one. And the boundary between sessions is exactly where memory is lost - which is why what an agent saves at the end, and reloads at the start, is the whole game.
Why this matters for Tropo
Tropo treats the session boundary as the most important moment in an agent's life.
Before a session ends, a Tropo agent writes its state - what it did, what it decided, what's still open - into the vault as a handoff. When the next session starts, it reads that back, so the new session inherits the last one's mind instead of starting blank. Sessions are mortal; the vault is the continuity that outlives them. That is how a crew stays coherent across thousands of sittings at the desk.
Beginner Path · New to Agents ← Before: What is Memory · Next: What is a Harness → Related: What is a Context Window · See the whole path: New to Agents - Beginner Path