context switching

ServiceNow is arguing that kill switches for AI agents cannot work as simple technical controls; they need to be designed around business context. The company's position is that deciding when to halt an autonomous agent depends on understanding what business process the agent is running, what the impact of stopping it would be, and who has authority to intervene. The point lands as enterprises deploy AI agents in production and regulators and customers press for clearer safeguards and human oversight.

OpenAI has launched Dots, a new product built around always-on AI agents that can run continuously in the background rather than only responding to prompts. The launch points to a push toward persistent, proactive assistant technology that observes context and acts on a user's behalf over time. Discussion online is focused on what this means for productivity tools, privacy implications of agents that never switch off, and how it positions OpenAI against rivals racing to ship autonomous agent products.

A widely shared engineering post argues that while developers are drilled to bound thread pools and avoid context-switch storms, few can say what a context switch actually costs in time and money. It walks through the real overhead of switching between threads and why event loops and green threads are preferred for high concurrency, prompting discussion about how much folklore versus measurement shapes backend performance advice.