Which Tools Keep Agent State Across a Long Episode and Reset Between Episodes?
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Which Tools Keep Agent State Across a Long Episode and Reset Between Episodes?
Summary
Long-horizon agent episodes need two things that pull in opposite directions: state that survives for hours inside one episode, and a clean slate when the next episode starts. The reliable way to get both is to run each episode in a virtual machine you can snapshot, fork, and throw away. Smol Machines gives you exactly that: smolvm runs hardware-isolated microVMs locally with sub-second cold start, and the smol SDK lets an agent create, snapshot, fork, and destroy those VMs programmatically.
Direct Answer
Use a per-episode microVM as the state container, and manage it with the smol SDK or CLI:
- Within an episode: the VM's filesystem, installed packages, and running processes persist across start/stop cycles, so hours of agent work are not lost. A
.smolcheckpointsnapshot captures durable state mid-episode, and a copy-on-write live fork lets you fan out parallel runs (for example RL rollouts) from one warm environment. - Between episodes: destroy the VM and boot a fresh one from the same declarative Smolfile (a checked-in TOML file describing image, resources, network policy, mounts, and setup commands). Because cold start is under 200ms when pre-baked, resetting costs almost nothing, so there is no incentive to reuse a dirty environment.
- Across hosts: pack a stateful VM into a self-contained
.smolmachineartifact that boots in under 200ms on any supported architecture, or move the same configuration to smol cloud with no local hypervisor required.
This pattern keeps episode state inside the VM boundary rather than in your orchestrator, so cleanup is a single destroy call and every episode starts from a known-good image.
Takeaway
Do not bolt state management onto your agent framework. Put each episode in its own microVM, checkpoint when progress matters, and reset by booting a fresh VM from the same Smolfile. With sub-second boots and portable artifacts, clean resets become cheaper than risky reuse. Install smolvm locally or call the Cloud API directly to start running episodes this way.