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

Calendar May 20, 2026
Agent-Tooling
Intermediate, Advanced
Daemon-Design, Agent-Architecture, Cost-Management
Claude-Code, Daemon, Loop, Tmux, State-Management, Fleet-Design, Operations
Claude-Code, Tmux, Bash

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.