Session Lifecycle - r5e

What a Session Is

An AgentSession is the live governance boundary. It binds an Agent (what kind of worker) to a Task (what work) through a Harness (how it runs). The session is the unit of accountability. “Who did this?” is always answerable with a session UID.

Lifecycle Phases

Pending → Initializing → Active → Completed / Failed / Declined / Revoked / Error

Phase	Meaning
Pending	Durable session exists; live process not started
Initializing	Process spawning, initial artifacts loading
Active	Live work being performed
Completed	Finished cleanly, outputs produced
Failed	Attempted the work, didn’t achieve the result
Declined	Agent legitimately refused (with structured reason)
Revoked	Externally stopped (governance, parent, timeout)
Error	Infrastructure failure prevented execution

Declined is Not Failure

An agent that declines is performing its governance function. Decline reasons flow back to the orchestrator as structured data:

insufficient_context — workflow may route back to research
authority_insufficient — escalation to parent
ethical_objection — escalation to human
needs_decomposition — orchestrator re-plans
scope_mismatch — orchestrator reassigns

The Reflect Step

After completing (or failing, or declining), the agent assesses:

What went right and wrong at the task level
Whether the decomposition was correct
Whether the orchestration could improve
What the system should learn from this session

Reflect is mandatory. The session cannot reach a terminal state without producing a reflect artifact.