ara/orchestra-skills/0-autoresearch-skill/references/agent-continuity.md

Agent Continuity: Keeping Research Running

Autonomous research requires agents that keep working continuously — hours, overnight, or days. This reference covers how to set up the wall-clock loop on each platform.

MANDATORY: Set Up Before Anything Else

The wall-clock loop is the first thing you do when starting autoresearch. Without it, the agent does one cycle of work and stops. The loop fires every 20 minutes and simply tells the agent: "keep working, check if anything's wrong."

This is completely separate from the research inner/outer loops. The wall-clock loop is a fixed-interval prompt injection. The research loops run at experiment speed (minutes to hours per cycle). They will not sync and don't need to.

Claude Code: /loop

Run this as your very first action:

/loop 20m Continue autoresearch. Read research-state.yaml and findings.md. Check: is the current experiment done? Are there errors? Is progress stalling? If everything is on track, keep working. If something is wrong, step back and fix it. Never idle.

What Happens on Each Tick

The /loop message fires every 20 minutes. When it fires:

1. Read state — research-state.yaml and findings.md to remember where you are and what you've learned
2. Check health — is the current experiment running? Did it error? Is training diverging?
3. If on track → continue whatever you were doing (don't restart or re-plan)
4. If stuck or broken → step back, diagnose the issue, fix it, then continue
5. If idle → you shouldn't be. Pick the next hypothesis and start an experiment

The tick is a nudge, not a phase boundary. If the previous tick's work isn't done, just keep going.

When Experiments Run Longer Than 20 Minutes

This is normal and expected. On the next tick:

• Check if the experiment finished
• If still running: monitor for errors, do lightweight work (update notes, search papers)
• Don't restart or duplicate the experiment

Context Recovery

Your primary memory between ticks is research-state.yaml and findings.md. Keep them updated after every experiment and reflection. If you lose context, read both files plus research-log.md to reconstruct where you are.

OpenClaw: Cron Job

Set up a 20-minute cron job in the current session as your very first action. Use the cron.add tool to create a recurring job bound to the current chat session:

{
  "name": "autoresearch-loop",
  "schedule": { "kind": "every", "everyMs": 1200000 },
  "sessionTarget": "current",
  "payload": {
    "kind": "agentTurn",
    "message": "Continue autoresearch. Read research-state.yaml and findings.md. Check: is the current experiment done? Are there errors? Is progress stalling? If everything is on track, keep working. If something is wrong, step back and fix it. Never idle."
  }
}

Key details:

• sessionTarget: "current" binds the cron to the current chat session (resolved to session:<sessionKey> at creation time), so it maintains conversation context across ticks
• everyMs: 1200000 = 20 minutes
• Verify with cron.list that the job is created and enabled
• To check run history later: cron.runs with the job ID

Context Between Cron Ticks

OpenClaw cron invocations may start fresh each time. Your workspace files are your memory:

• research-state.yaml — where you are, what's active
• findings.md — what you've learned (read this every time!)
• research-log.md — what happened chronologically

Keep these updated after every action so the next cron tick can pick up seamlessly.

Progress Reports

OpenClaw can't open HTML files locally like Claude Code can. When you have something to report:

1. Generate a PDF progress summary (use Python with reportlab, matplotlib, or similar)
2. Include: research question, key results, optimization trajectory plot, current understanding, next steps
3. Send it to the user via Telegram, WhatsApp, or Slack — whichever channel they use
4. When you get an exciting result or interesting plot, send it right away — don't wait for a full report

Research State as Ground Truth

Both platforms share the same ground truth: the workspace files.

File	Purpose	Update Frequency
research-state.yaml	Machine-readable state	After every experiment and reflection
research-log.md	Decision timeline	After every significant action
findings.md	Narrative understanding + project memory	After every outer loop
experiments/*/results/	Raw experimental data	After every experiment

The wall-clock loop (/loop or cron) is just the trigger. The workspace files are the memory. Keep them current.