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Drive A Kept-Alive Agent Session

This tutorial walks through a single long-lived tmux session that stays alive while you send follow-up work into it.

Goal

By the end, you will:

  • create a tmux session with tp
  • launch an interactive agent inside it
  • send work into the live session
  • wait for the agent to become ready before sending more work
  • inspect status without attaching

1. Create a session

tp new demo-agent -c ~/repos/myapp -d "Interactive agent rollout"

This creates a detached tmux session named demo-agent rooted at your project directory.

2. Launch an interactive agent

Claude Code:

tp send demo-agent "claude"

Codex:

tp send demo-agent "codex --profile yolo --no-alt-screen"

Attach if you want to confirm the prompt once:

tp jump demo-agent

Detach from tmux when the agent is back at its normal prompt.

3. Send the first task

tp send demo-agent "write a short summary of the auth module"

This types the text into the live session and submits it.

4. Send follow-up work safely

Interactive agents are not always ready for a second instruction immediately after the first one. Use --wait when the session may still be working:

tp send --wait demo-agent "now add tests for the auth module"

tp waits for the agent to return to a sendable state before it types the next instruction.

5. Check status without attaching

tp status demo-agent
tp peek demo-agent -n 40

tp status shows the detected agent and its state. tp peek shows recent scrollback without taking over the terminal.

6. Clean up

tp kill demo-agent

What to do next