Building a Database for Your Agent
rdbms · reddit · 2026-07-12
After building 6 agent harnesses in the past 6 months, the author summarized several common practices:
- Keep prompts as short as possible
- Give agents room for autonomous execution
- Use deterministic gates and policies
- Have agents self-reflect and combine with evaluations
- Manage state and isolate environments
They also emphasized an often-overlooked point: giving the agent a dedicated database. Not the application's business database, but an "agent.db" that records what the agent has done.
Currently, they primarily use SQLite + WAL as an execution log to record events like dispatches, evaluations, and results. This provides several benefits:
- Facilitates post-hoc review and understanding of agent behavior
- Makes it easy to generate subsequent feature requirements from logs
- Supports pausing and resuming execution
- Provides agents with quickly searchable and continuously accumulative state
Finally, they asked the community: besides markdown files, how is everyone using databases to track agent behaviors, queues, tasks, and learnings?
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