Problem
Waiting for one long task should not monopolise the conversation.
My design choice
Let a persistent worker own the job. The conversation gets a receipt and stays free; the result belongs to the system.
What I built
A durable asynchronous queue, independent worker and saved job results.
How it works
The controller submits bounded work and gets a receipt. The service owns execution, checkpoints and the result. A later session can retrieve it.
Verification
A five-second diagnostic was submitted in 78 ms. An unrelated query returned in 68 ms while the job was running. It completed, and a fresh remote process retrieved the result. These are on-device call timings.
Limitations
The machine must be awake and connected. Jobs can wait behind other work. A diagnostic verifies the queue, not a production workload or a guaranteed completion time.
What I learned
A durable job needs a clear owner and recoverable output; it does not need a permanent conversational agent.
This is a sanitised account of Chris’s own system. Private memory, account details and research data are not connected to this website.