Disconnected Agent Mode: Designing for the Network You Don't Have
A flight attendant asks you to switch to airplane mode. The customer-support agent your team shipped last quarter is mid-conversation in a tab, and the next user turn returns a spinner that never resolves. The agent isn't broken in any interesting way. It just assumed, in a hundred unwritten places, that the network exists.
That assumption is the most expensive line of code your product team never wrote down. It governs how you store conversation state, how you call tools, how you surface errors, what you eval against, and what your users do when the connection drops in the middle of work that mattered to them. Disconnected agent mode is the discipline of pulling that assumption out of the foundation, looking at it, and deciding — explicitly — what should happen when the round trip to a hosted API isn't available.
