An agent that finishes the job while you sleep — close the laptop, it keeps working

The idea in one line: you hand an agent a big, boring task — "read these 200 emails and pull out three takeaways" — close the laptop, and pick up the finished result an hour later. It worked the whole time on its own.

Why this just became possible

A normal agent lives only while the window is open. Long task — reads a dump, counts, builds a report — and you sit there holding the tab. Close the laptop on the train, lose the Wi-Fi, and the agent dies halfway. Start over.

On July 7, Google added background tasks to the Gemini API. You set one parameter — background: true — and the request goes off to run on Google's server. You get an ID back immediately. No need to hold the connection: close the tab, come back an hour later, fetch the result by that ID. And they opened it on the free tier — so you can try it for zero.

Now the agent survives a shut lid and a dropped connection. You're not waiting on it — it's waiting on you.

What you'll learn

• Async. The task lives not in your window but on the server — and survives your window closing.
• Polling by ID. How to fetch the result when it's ready, instead of staring at a spinner.
• A long agent task. Read a lot, count, boil it down to a short takeaway.
• Zero server of your own. It all runs at Google's — you just send the task and grab the answer.

A ready starter prompt

Don't ask for "an agent that reads my email" — you'll get a chatty bot that hangs on a long task. Describe the background launch and the polling by ID:

The strong prompt sets up not a "smart bot" but the right mechanics: fire into the background, get an ID, fetch it later. That's exactly what lets the task survive a closed laptop.

What the result looks like

You hand the agent "read my order export for the month and tell me what sells worst." You hit "run" — and get back a line: "working, ID: …". You close the laptop, go to lunch. You come back, hit "check" — and there's a finished breakdown: three worst sellers and why nobody buys them. You didn't stare at a spinner the whole time. It did it itself.

Start with a tiny task — "sum up this list" — just to see the answer arrive after you've already closed the tab. Then you'll want to feed it something long and genuinely tedious.

Source: Google — Expanding Managed Agents in Gemini API: background tasks, remote MCP and more