basicagent.org

BasicAgent

What Happens When Your Terminal Dies Mid-Task

When a terminal dies mid-task, state and output vanish. A persistent environment prevents the restart spiral.

Published: 2026-01-04 · Last updated: 2026-01-04

When a terminal dies mid-task, you lose output, state, and confidence. The usual fix is "start over," which is expensive and often wrong.

Why it happens

  • the session is tied to the connection,
  • the process is not durable,
  • output is not replayed on reconnect.

The result

You cannot tell what completed, what failed, or what to trust. The re-run becomes the default, even when the task was nearly done.

The continuity fix

A persistent environment keeps the session alive and replays output on reconnect, so you can resume the same task without re-running it.