@nutritious-balloon-65098 clone the codex and openhands/software-agent-sdk repos and see what i’m talking about, and propose a possible way of implementing this.

Summary This was a research and analysis task — no code changes were made. The user asked me to clone the Codex and OpenHands SDK repos and investigate how Codex monitors background processes, then propose an implementation approach. What I found Codex's approach (in

codex-rs/core/src/unified_exec/

): • Uses two tools:

exec_command

(starts a PTY process) and

write_stdin

(sends input or polls with empty

chars

) • Both accept a

yield_time_ms

parameter — the LLM explicitly controls how long to wait before getting control back (250ms–30s range) • The output schema uses

session_id

presence as the "still running" signal: if

session_id

is in the response, the process is still running and the LLM calls

write_stdin(session_id=X)

to check back. When done, only

exit_code

is present. • Yields are proactive and time-based — the LLM gets control back after N ms regardless of output activity OpenHands current behavior has all the machinery but with poor framing: •

timeout=N

already returns after N seconds with

exit_code=-1

(process keeps running) — this IS the yield mechanism, but it's described as "you'll be asked whether to continue or stop it" • The "still running" signal is buried in

exit_code=-1

, which also means errors • Yields are reactive (fire only after 30s of silence), not proactive Proposed implementation (three tiers) 1. Tier 1 — Update descriptions/messages: reframe

timeout

as a "soft yield interval" and

TIMEOUT_MESSAGE_TEMPLATE

as a positive status update rather than error language 2. Tier 2 — Add

still_running: bool

to

TerminalObservation

as an unambiguous signal (direct equivalent of Codex's

session_id

presence), set in the no-change and hard-timeout handlers 3. Tier 3 — Make

timeout

proactive (fire after N seconds regardless of output activity) instead of the current reactive no-change trigger — this is the actual behavioral parity with Codex's

yield_time_ms

OpenHands encountered an error: **Failed to send message to agent server: HTTP 503 error: no available server ** See the conversation for more information.

here’s the draft PR though: https://github.com/OpenHands/software-agent-sdk/pull/3806