Stateful vs Stateless Agent Daemons: A-Mode /loop vs C-Mode cron

May 20, 2026

Daemon-Design, Agent-Architecture, Cost-Management

Claude-Code, Daemon, Loop, Tmux, State-Management, Fleet-Design, Operations

Stateful vs Stateless Agent Daemons#

Long-running agents on the Max subscription split cleanly into two operating modes. A-mode keeps a single /loop session alive across cycles, accumulating in-session context that gets cleared once a day. C-mode wraps claude -p in a bash sleep loop; every cycle is a fresh process with zero carryover. Both run forever in tmux. Both cost $0 of Anthropic API spend (the subscription pays). They behave very differently per cycle.

Tiered-LLM Tooling: Local Model by Default, Escalate to the Frontier Model

May 27, 2026

Agent-Tooling

Intermediate, Advanced

Llm-Application-Design, Agent-Architecture

Llm, Local-Llm, Ollama, Agents, Cost-Optimization, Tool-Calling, Architecture

Ollama, Claude

Tiered-LLM Tooling: Local by Default, Escalate to Frontier#

When you build a chat or ops interface backed by an LLM, paying a frontier model for every interaction is wasteful — most interactions are cheap lookups, summaries, and routing. A tiered design serves the high-frequency majority with a small local model (e.g. an Ollama-served model on a GPU you already have) and escalates to a frontier model (e.g. Claude) only for the hard minority.