Build AI Agents that Never Sleep
Build production-style AI agents in Node.js that keep working after the prompt ends. Learn how to run agent jobs in the background with durable state, tool execution, retries, scheduling, and the guardrails needed to make automation trustworthy.
Netflix Engineer, Founder, & AI Builder

Design long-running, reliable Node.js agents that work in the background with queues, retries, schedules, and observability.
Most AI demos stop at a chat box. Real products need agents that continue working after the user closes the tab: processing jobs, reacting to events, retrying failures, coordinating tools, and reporting progress along the way.
In this hands-on workshop, you’ll build a Node.js-based background agent system from the ground up. Starting from a simple tool-calling loop, you’ll evolve it into a durable workflow that can run asynchronously, store state, schedule future work, recover from errors, and surface useful telemetry. Along the way, you’ll learn the patterns that make unattended agents practical in production: queues, resumability, idempotency, memory management, approvals, and observability.
By the end of the day, you’ll have a working reference architecture for background agents and a mental model for when to use them, how to keep them safe, and how to make them reliable enough for real applications.
What You Will Master
- Build a background agent architecture in Node.js that separates interactive requests from durable asynchronous work.
- Model agent runs, tasks, and tool calls so jobs can resume safely after failures or restarts.
- Add queues, retries, backoff, idempotency, and timeouts to keep long-running workflows reliable.
- Orchestrate scheduled work, webhook-driven triggers, and human approvals without blocking the main app.
- Persist context, memory, and artifacts in ways that keep agents useful without exploding token usage.
- Instrument background workflows with logs, traces, and run history so failures are explainable and debuggable.
- Design guardrails around tool access, secrets, and risky actions before agents are allowed to operate unattended.
- Leave with a hands-on Node.js project you can adapt for support bots, research agents, internal automations, or ops workflows.
Prerequisites
- Comfortable with modern JavaScript or TypeScript and basic Node.js development.
- Able to run a local Node.js project, install dependencies with npm, and work from the terminal.
- Familiarity with async/await, APIs, and basic server concepts.
- Basic understanding of LLM APIs or prior use of an AI SDK is helpful, but not required.
- Bring a laptop with Node.js LTS, npm, Git, and an editor already installed.
- An LLM API key is recommended for the hands-on exercises.
Who is this for?
This workshop is for developers who already have some JavaScript or TypeScript experience and want to move beyond chat-based AI demos into real agent systems. It is especially useful for full-stack engineers, backend engineers, and technical founders building automations, internal tools, or product features where work needs to continue asynchronously in the background. Prior agent experience is helpful but not required.
Replay coming soon.
Build a hands-on Node.js background agent that can accept work, execute tools asynchronously, recover from failures, and safely run without constant human supervision.
Build production-style AI agents in Node.js that keep working after the prompt ends. Learn how to run agent jobs in the background with durable state, tool execution, retries, scheduling, and the guardrails needed to make automation trustworthy.
Warning: High intensity learning environment.
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