Google open-sources Long Horizon, 5 design patterns that enable agents to work across weeks without silently breaking
Google Open Sources Long Horizon, 5 Design Patterns That Allow Agents to Work Across Weeks Without Breaking Silently by Nokka | August 22, 2026. There is a sentence in a Google Cloud article that summarizes the problem with AI agents very well: "A one-shot agent breaks in front of you and stops. A long-horizon agent...
Google has open-sourced Long Horizon, an agent harness designed for long-term AI operations, on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. The team at Google identified five design patterns that can cause long-horizon agents to fail quietly, and they are sharing these patterns and their solutions. The patterns include issues with prefix caching, background learning, persistent workspaces, explicit failure, and sub-agent timeouts.
These design patterns were learned from running Long Horizon with Google for several weeks before its release. The Long Horizon agent harness was built using the Agent Development Kit (ADK).
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