The Garbage Collection Problem: When Agents Clean Up After Themselves

Most agent frameworks teach you how to start an agent. Almost none teach you how to clean up after one.

The result? Agents that work fine for a week, then crash because /var/log/ filled the disk. Migrations that fail because old session state conflicts with new configuration. Audit trails full of orphaned temp files that nobody remembers creating.

Garbage collection isn’t a nice-to-have for autonomous agents. It’s a reliability requirement.