Docs/Gateway/Keeping agents running
Gateway

Keeping agents running

4 min read

DevThrottle's promise is that you can look away without your agents stopping. This page is the honest map of how that works: which piece runs what, what keeps going when you close something, and what comes back after a crash or a reboot.

Three layers, three lifetimes

  • Viewers - the Cockpit in a browser, and your phone. Pure views. Open and close them as often as you like; nothing about your agents changes.
  • The Director - the desktop app that owns the agent sessions. The agent processes are its children: as long as the Director runs, your agents run, whether or not you are looking at any of it.
  • The Gateway - a small tray app that starts when you log in and stays on. It does not run the agents itself; it keeps the machine reachable (serving the Cockpit and your phone), tracks the Directors running on it, and can start a Director on its own when a scheduled run fires.
Note
The practical rule: walk away from the desk, close the browser, pocket the phone - agents keep working, and you can answer them from anywhere the Gateway is reachable. The Director window itself is the one thing to leave running.

Closing the Director

Because sessions live inside the Director, closing it ends them - so the app will not let that happen silently. If any session is actively working or waiting on you when you close the window, a dialog lists those sessions by name and asks whether to close anyway. Confirm, and the sessions are shut down cleanly; cancel, and nothing stops.

Warning
Closing the Director ends the agent processes. Every change the agents made to your files stays, and Claude Code conversations can be reopened later with Resume Session - but in-flight work stops where it stands.

Picking up where you left off

The board's state is saved continuously, so reopening the Director puts your sessions, names, numbers, and ordering back the way you had them. Two recovery paths cover the rest:

  • Resume Session - past Claude Code conversations are listed in the New Session dialog with a summary and message count, and reopen with their context intact.
  • Interrupted sessions - if a Director exits abnormally (a crash, a forced shutdown), it keeps a journal of the sessions that were alive. On the next start, the interrupted sessions are offered back so you can restore them instead of reconstructing the board from memory.

After a reboot

The Gateway registers itself to start at login (you can toggle "Start on login" from its tray icon), so the machine comes back reachable without any ritual. Everything the Gateway owns is persisted on disk and survives the restart: scheduled jobs and their run history, paired devices, and machine settings. Scheduled jobs recompute their next run time on startup, and if a job fires when no Director is open, the Gateway launches one - so unattended runs do not depend on you remembering to open anything.

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