Follow-up Messages

OutcomeDev allows you to seamlessly continue a task execution by asking follow-up questions, directing the agent towards a new outcome, or catching up on errors directly from the chat interface. Depending on whether your task is marked as Keep-Alive or Non-Keep-Alive, the infrastructure handles the chat follow-up completely differently to optimize speed and compute efficiency.

Keep-Alive Tasks

When a task has Keep-Alive enabled, the sandbox container remains active and running even after the AI agent has completed its execution stream. Follow-ups on Keep-Alive tasks are instantaneous and maintain full ephemeral system state (like running development servers, in-memory process caches, or uncommitted files).

1. Instant Execution: The system immediately relays your follow-up message to the already-running sandbox via our sandbox infrastructure.
2. State Preservation: Any processes running inside the container (e.g. npm run dev) are still alive.
3. No Setup Overhead: Because the environment is still spun-up, there's no waiting for Git cloning, branch switching, or dependency installations.

Ideal for: Rapid iteration, actively debugging application processes, and when you are closely monitoring the AI's step-by-step progress.

Non Keep-Alive Tasks

By default, OutcomeDev keeps the AI sandbox active for a 5-minute Warm Window after the agent finishes its work. This period is billed to your account because it provides instant reconnection for follow-up messages.

If no activity is detected for 5 minutes, the system gracefully shuts down the compute instance. In this case, follow-up messages will trigger a fresh environment re-hydration (cloning your repo and installing dependencies), ensuring you can still pick up exactly where you left off.

Ideal for: One-off fire-and-forget automation, scheduled cron tasks, and large batches where resources should be conserved.

The Chat UI Experience

Regardless of the backend infrastructure strategy chosen for your task, the chat interface masks this complexity. OutcomeDev leverages a continuous WebSocket connection so follow-up responses stream fluidly into your chat UI instantly.

• Non-blocking UI: When you hit "Send", the connection stays intact. Follow-up answers stream back natively via realtime events (task_update, new_message, agent_completed).
• Resilient Recovery: In the event that a sandbox hangs or network issues disrupt the stream, OutcomeDev is equipped with a 45-second heartbeat recovery algorithm that safely attempts reconnection to the event-stream.

Rewind and Message Deletion

If you realize an agent went down the wrong path, you can use Rewind or Delete Message to alter the conversation history.

When you delete a message or rewind the task:

1. The specified messages are removed from the database history.
2. The agent's persistent CLI session is automatically cleared.
3. On your next follow-up message, the agent starts a fresh session using only the correct, truncated conversation history. This ensures the agent does not retain "phantom memory" of the deleted messages.