hey, ishaan here (kartik's cofounder). this post came out of a lot of back-and-forth between us trying to pin down what people actually mean when they say "async agents."

the analogy that clicked for me was a turn-based telephone call—only one person can talk at a time. you ask, it answers, you wait. even if the task runs for an hour, you're waiting for your turn.

we kept circling until we started drawing parallels to what async actually means in programming. using that as the reference point made everything clearer: it's not about how long something runs or where it runs. it's about whether the caller blocks on it.