What is a session

A session is a single agent run bound to a cloud machine. When you start one, the broker hands your chosen agent a fresh, isolated VM, connects your integrations, and streams the work back to you — usually a Slack or Discord thread.

Lifecycle

The broker keeps a warm pool of machines so sessions start fast. Each machine moves through a lifecycle:

bootstrapping → ready → claimed (active ⇄ idle) → dead

1. Ready — a provisioned VM waits in the warm pool.
2. Claimed — a request (from Slack, Discord, the web dashboard, or a trigger) claims a ready VM; your org setup and the selected personality are applied.
3. Active / idle — the agent works (active); between turns the claim sits idle. Idle timeouts eventually wind the session down and reclaim the machine.
4. Dead — ending a session (for example replying !done in the thread) releases the machine, and the pool is replenished.

Exact state names, the timeouts that drive them, and the resume contract are in the lifecycle reference.

What a session gives the agent

• An isolated cloud VM scoped to your org’s fleet.
• Your selected harness (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or a custom agent) and model.
• Your connected integrations and short-lived credentials.
• Durable checkpoints so work survives the machine it ran on.

The point of a session is that none of this lives on your laptop — the agent runs in the cloud, on your terms, and reports back.

Next steps

• Fleets, brokers & compute — where sessions run and who schedules them.
• Session lifecycle reference — every state, timeout, and failure mode.
• Quickstart — from signup to a working session.