What is Wake Condition?
Also called trigger condition, activation condition.
A wake condition is the rule that causes an idle agent to begin a run. It may be a schedule, an incoming event such as a message or webhook, a state change detected by polling, or a threshold crossing in monitored data, and it determines both how promptly an agent responds and how much it costs while nothing is happening.
The choice between event driven and polled waking is the central tradeoff. Events wake an agent only when something actually happened, which is efficient and prompt but requires the source system to emit a notification. Polling works against any readable source but spends resources on checks that find nothing, and its interval sets a floor on response latency.
Schedules are the simplest wake condition and often the wrong default. An agent that wakes hourly to find nothing to do burns cost and log volume for no result, while one that wakes daily may respond far too slowly to a time sensitive change. Choosing the cadence from how quickly the work actually needs handling avoids both.
Waking is not the same as being permitted to act. A well designed system separates the trigger from the gates that follow it, so an agent may wake, evaluate current conditions, and correctly conclude that nothing needs doing. Runs that wake and exit immediately are healthy behavior, not wasted effort, provided the check itself is cheap.
Wake conditions need protection against storms. A source emitting a burst of events can trigger many overlapping runs that duplicate work or exhaust rate limits, so debouncing, coalescing multiple events into one run, and limiting concurrent runs per agent are standard. Missed wakes deserve monitoring too, since an agent that silently stops waking looks identical to one with nothing to do.
Key points
- Schedules, events, polling, and thresholds are the main forms
- Events are prompt and cheap; polling is universal but wasteful
- Waking and being permitted to act are separate decisions
- Debounce and cap concurrency to survive event bursts
- Monitor for missed wakes, which look like idleness
In practice
An inventory agent wakes on a webhook whenever stock changes, debounced so a bulk import fires one run rather than four hundred. It also wakes on a daily schedule as a safety net, because webhook delivery is not guaranteed. Most scheduled wakes find nothing outstanding and exit within a second, which confirms the event path is working rather than indicating wasted runs.