The short answer

Agent Rooms use explicit lifecycle transitions rather than treating silence as completion. A Room can pause and resume; archived Rooms are read-only. Subroom relationships and outstanding work constrain when the parent can be completed.

A lifecycle transition expresses a domain decision

A worker stopping and a Room pausing are different events. The worker may have crashed while the objective remains active. A pause records an intentional change in how work may proceed.

The Room lifecycle reference documents active, paused, completed and archived states, with invalid transitions rejected. Your user interface should issue the domain transition and display its persisted outcome rather than merely hiding controls locally.

Completion and archival serve different readers

Completion communicates that the work has reached its terminal objective under the applicable lifecycle rules. Archival preserves a read-only record. These states help a returning participant distinguish work that is waiting from work that has concluded.

For an illustrative proposal app, show completion beside the accepted deliverable and keep its review history accessible. Before presenting an archive action, explain that the resulting Room cannot be edited through ordinary work interactions. Do not use a visual “done” badge as a substitute for the persisted transition.

Keep the parent and subroom relationship visible

A subroom retains its parent relationship. The documented lifecycle prevents a parent from completing while a direct subroom remains active. A parent summary should therefore make unfinished child work discoverable.

Imagine a proposal whose research is delegated into a subroom. A reviewer may approve the current draft while research remains active. Treat the accepted artifact and the parent lifecycle as separate facts. Read the domain response to completion rather than assuming one approval closes every related work unit.

Track membership separately from Room status

Participant membership is independently revisioned and influences routing and Handoff eligibility. A Room's active state does not mean every participant is eligible to receive execution. Humans can contribute and review, while tasks resolve to agent participants.

The HTTP API reference exposes lifecycle operations and optional membership services. Build controls around the services actually configured by the host and re-read state after a revision conflict. A stale screen should not silently override a more recent participant change.

Verify the record after each transition

  • Pause a Room and inspect the persisted lifecycle state.
  • Resume through the domain operation and confirm the new state.
  • Attempt an invalid transition and retain the rejection.
  • Inspect outstanding subrooms before completing a parent.
  • Attempt an ordinary write after archival and confirm it is rejected.

These suggested checks complement the reference self-hosting demonstration. They help validate the application's treatment of lifecycle rules without relying on the appearance of its interface.

Sources and further reading

Documentation reviewed . Consult the linked documentation for current implementation details.