Missions vs sessions
A mission is the larger unit: it has a target, a budget, a deadline, explicit sign-off gates, and durable state that outlives any single chat.
What breaks when work outgrows a session#
- Context evaporates. Each new session re-explains the same background.
- Failures go quiet. Work spread across terminal tabs fails without anyone noticing.
- Nothing accumulates. Yesterday's decisions are not available to today's agent.
What a mission adds#
- Explicit context — carried across sessions instead of retyped.
- Decomposition — the goal becomes a reviewable graph, not one long prompt.
- Receipts — what ran, on which runtime, at what cost.
- A review loop — the engine checks the result against the contract rather than trusting the plan.
The practical difference#
With sessions you manage attention constantly, because nothing else is watching. With missions you manage exceptions — see the attention queue.