February 9, 2026
Async or ain't sync? Pass the butter
Everyone’s building “async agents,” but almost no one can define them
Are 'async agents' real or just buzzwords? Devs feud, butter jokes fly
TLDR: The piece says agents aren’t inherently asynchronous; it’s about whether you wait, not where they run or how long. Commenters split between 'just a background job' and 'new work style,' trading phone-call analogies, butter jokes, and how-to demands for Claude Code—highlighting real stakes: better multitasking without confusion.
No one can agree what an “async agent” is. The article argues there’s no secret sauce—an agent isn’t inherently asynchronous; it’s about whether you wait for it or not. Long-running tasks, cloud setups, timer triggers? The author says those are just vibes, not definitions, and backs it with the simple idea: an agent is a chatty tool-runner with memory.
Comments lit up. Cofounder isehgal’s “turn-based telephone call” analogy (one talks, one waits) won the semantics crowd. Animats fired back with a curt “Background job?” and asked who gets to interrupt whom. jsemrau did the classic I wrote this nine months ago flex with a link, while sjanes stole the show with butter-bot minimalism: “I ask for butter and walk away.” Pragmatists like codazoda wanted receipts: How do I do this with Claude Code? The split: Team “it’s just multitasking” vs Team “new way to work,” with memes, self-promotion, and notification wars in between.
Everyone agrees on one payoff: delegate, don’t babysit—let the bot work while you live your life. Just don’t call it magic.
Key Points
- •The term “async agents” lacks a consistent industry definition across posts and product announcements.
- •Long-running, cloud-based, and event-driven interpretations describe correlates but do not define inherent asynchrony.
- •An agent is defined as an LLM running tools in a loop with continuity of context; clearing or starting a new session creates a new agent.
- •Asynchrony is relative to the caller: a task is async if the caller does not block; the same agent can be used synchronously or asynchronously.
- •Using agents asynchronously enables concurrency, allowing multiple tasks to progress without waiting.