TL;DR: Keep working on long tasks in the background while still answering the user right away. LangChain proposes async subagents for this, since in the standard ReAct loop a single long tool call blocks everything else.
Agents Are Going Async (LangChain)
Key points
・🧠 Agents need to be responsive (react immediately) and productive (advance many long tasks at once)
・🚧 In a ReAct loop, one long tool call makes every other task wait
・🔀 The design is one orchestrator that stays with the user, plus background workers
・🛠️ Five management tools: start, check, update, cancel, and list async_task
・♻️ Follow-ups use interrupt (default, for corrections) or enqueue (for additions)
・🔔 Results are picked up before the next model call if busy, or wake the orchestrator if idle
・🧪 Available in Deep Agents and Managed Deep Agents, in beta
The post has no benchmarks and is a LangChain product write-up, but the design ideas are useful.
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