Async tool calls let AI agents keep working while long tasks run

A DEV Community article argues that AI agents should use non-blocking tool calls rather than a blocking run() function. Under the proposed pattern, start() immediately returns a task handle, status() reports progress, and stop() cancels the job, while results come back later as events. The author explains that blocking calls cause latency to pile up, make user instructions stale, and risk gateway timeouts during slow tasks like test suites. The design is drawn from an essay by the DeepSeek Harness team, which describes it as full-duplex and notes it is implemented but not enabled by default. The author presents it as an architectural pattern to emulate rather than an official product feature.
This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.
Discussion (0)
Log in to join the discussion and vote.
Log in