2026-10-24-pi-coding-agent-durable-1-4-can-hibernate-between-phases-with-a-one-way-sqlite-upgrade

Durable 1.4 can hibernate between phases, with a one-way SQLite upgrade. runtime.sleep() is removed. sleepUntil() ends a phase with a durable checkpoint and a sleeping task, allowing retry backoff, deferred polls and scheduled work to release their invocation. wake()/onWake tell a host whether work is active or the earliest time it must restart. This makes host alarms a real part of correctness: the host must arrange a durable wake and reopen/resume the harness; an in-memory timer alone cannot wake a dead process. SQLite automatically migrates to schema version 2, which 1.3.0 and earlier cannot open. JSONL needs no migration, but older code cannot resume the new sleeping task state. Every defineDoc/defineDocFamily must supply checkpointWhen; () => false deliberately retains delta-only behavior. Version 1.3 had already added SQLite namespacing and coordination for shared Durable Object storage, corrected the leading system baseline after compaction, and reduced image base64 memory pressure.

Channel: tagged-release. Half: both. Date: 2026-10-21.

Operator consequence: Back up persistent state and plan rollback before any 1.4 process opens the database. Split work after a wait into a new phase, update exhaustive state handlers and fakes, and verify that alarms survive a process dying around a commit. The gain is substantive: the host need not keep an invocation alive merely to wait. The scarce engineering attention moves to wake ownership, storage migration and replay-safe external effects, not another chat-loop wrapper. The dated Cloudflare announcement describes Agents SDK 0.30.0 adopting this host contract; it is not evidence that every hosted Pi front end has upgraded.

Receipt

• https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/v1.4.0/packages/durable/CHANGELOG.md
• https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/v1.4.0/packages/durable/README.md#L139-L220
• https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/v1.4.0/packages/durable/src/storage/sqlite/migrations.ts
• https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-10-22-pi-harness-pi-1-4/