resonate-bash

resonate-bash

Overview

resonate-bash is a Resonate MCP tool that runs shell scripts as durable, asynchronous tasks. An agent submits a script, gets a promise ID back immediately, and is notified when the command terminates. The script runs in the background — on the local host, inside a Docker container, or in a remote sandbox — and outlives the session it was submitted from.

The polling loop runs in the shell, not in the model. The model is not invoked during the wait. That is the entire point.

When to use this skill

Reach for resonate-bash when any of the following is true:

• The work is likely to take longer than ~2 minutes.
• The work must survive a session close, a host crash, or a new conversation tomorrow.
• You want a named promise ID a later session can look up.
• You want the script to outlive the calling agent — fire-and-watch coordination with external systems.

Keep regular Bash (foreground or run_in_background: true) for fast commands, single-session work where survival doesn't matter, or non-idempotent fire-then-poll patterns the durable runtime would amplify (the script restarts from the top on crash — guard with check-then-trigger if a side effect must not double-fire).

What resonate-bash is good at

Long-running polling loops. Waiting for an external system to reach a state — a CI run finishes, a deploy goes live, DNS propagates, an image-generation job completes, a Tensorlake sandbox returns, a BigQuery export job finishes. The until X; sleep N; done loop runs in the shell, not in the model.

{
  "id": "ci-watch-2026-05-21",
  "script": "until gh run view 12345 --json status -q .status | grep -q completed; do sleep 60; done",
  "timeout_ms": 3600000
}

Operations that need to outlive the current session. Promises live on the Resonate server, not in the calling Claude Code session. If the laptop closes, the host hiccups, or a new conversation starts tomorrow, the work continues. A later session can look up the promise ID and read the result via promise-get or promise-search.