I Built a Stateful Research Agent Inside a Sandbox. Here's What the Numbers Actually Looked Like. (opens in new tab)

Three steps into a multi-page research task, the agent lost everything. Not a crash. Not a thrown exception. The function returned, context reset, and the pricing data it had just collected vanished. This failure is predictable: stateless execution environments were never built to hold state across browser sessions that run for twenty minutes. You hit it eventually, usually at the worst moment. The two standard workarounds are both annoying. Stuffing state into the prompt works until token co...