# Agent session (session)

Agent session: One running instance of a harness working a task on a device, the actual process you can watch in real time.

Source: https://codeherder.com/glossary/agent-session/

Glossary · The work

One running instance of a harness working a task on a device, the actual process you can watch in real time.

## What it is

A session is a single harness process running on a device, tied to one task. It's the concrete, watchable thing: you can drop into a session's live terminal, see what the agent is actually doing right now, and send it input if it needs a nudge, the same way you'd look over a developer's shoulder. When the session ends, whether it finished cleanly or ran into trouble, its full transcript stays attached to the task.

## Why it matters to you

When something feels off, a stuck task, a surprising result, a session is where you go to find out why. Being able to watch a session live, rather than waiting for a final result with no visibility into how it got there, is what turns "the agent did something" into an actual explanation. For anyone who's ever had to take a developer's word for what happened, this is the difference between trusting the summary and being able to check it.

## How it works in CodeHerder

CodeHerder's Sessions view lets you follow what your agents are doing in real time, drop into a live terminal, and review a finished session's full timeline afterward. The following a live session doc covers watching a session live and sending it auditable input. It also covers managing capacity across queued sessions, including what to do when a session looks stuck rather than simply slow.

- [Following a live session →](https://codeherder.com/docs/following-a-live-session/)

## What people get wrong

A session and a task aren't the same thing. A task can pass through several sessions over its lifetime, one for the code stage, another for review, each a separate run, even though the task itself is the one continuous unit of work moving through the workflow. A session ending isn't the same as a task finishing, either: a session can end because its stage is done and hand off cleanly to the next one, with the task itself still very much in progress overall.

Keep going

## Related terms

[Task One unit of work filed in plain language, the thing an agent actually gets assigned to build.](https://codeherder.com/glossary/task/) [Coding agent harness The specific CLI an agent runs inside, such as Claude Code or Codex, the thing CodeHerder actually launches on a device.](https://codeherder.com/glossary/coding-agent-harness/) [Device A machine you've registered, your laptop, a spare workstation, or a cloud instance, that CodeHerder can actually dispatch task work to.](https://codeherder.com/glossary/device/) [Workflow stage One position a task passes through on its way to done, such as plan, code, review, merge, or verify.](https://codeherder.com/glossary/workflow-stage/)

[← See every term](https://codeherder.com/glossary)