Most "AI agent" demos die at the same place: a tweet, a screenshot, a five-minute video. Then the founder closes the laptop and the agent quietly stops existing.
I wanted to know what it actually takes to keep an agent running for a month — not "working in a Jupyter notebook for an afternoon," but on for 30 consecutive days, processing real inputs, surviving real failures, without me babysitting it.
The headline answer: the model isn't the hard part. The hard part is the eight unglamorous engineering decisions you make before the agent ever generates a token.
Here's what shipped, what broke, and what fixed it.
The setup
