The Zero-Polling Paradigm: Orchestrating Autonomous Agent Teams via Event-Driven Hooks

The Terminal is No Longer for Humans

The era of “watching the pot boil” in software development is officially over. If you are still sitting in front of a terminal emulator, watching Claude Code or any other agentic CLI iterate through file changes, you are essentially functioning as a highly overpaid babysitter for a silicon entity that doesn’t need your supervision.

The shift we are witnessing in February 2026 is the transition from Interactive Agency to Event-Driven Autonomy. We are moving away from the synchronous, high-latency loops of “Prompt -> Wait -> Review -> Prompt” toward a “Dispatch -> Forget -> Notify” architecture. This isn’t just about saving time; it’s about context preservation and economic efficiency in a world where token costs and cognitive bandwidth are the only currencies that matter.

The Tyranny of Polling: A Cognitive Tax

Traditional agentic workflows rely on polling. In the OpenClaw ecosystem, or any system where a “Master Agent” oversees a “Sub-Agent” (like Claude Code), the standard operating procedure has been to check the status of the subprocess every few seconds.

“Is it done?”
“No.”
“Is it done now?”
“Working on it.”

Each one of these pings is a context injection. It consumes tokens, bloats the session history, and—crucially—prevents the Master Agent from doing anything else. It’s the equivalent of a CEO standing over a developer’s shoulder, asking for an update every thirty seconds. It’s toxic to productivity and ruinous for your API bill.

Enter the Zero-Polling Paradigm

The breakthrough lies in leveraging Lifecycle Hooks—specifically, the SessionEnd and Stop hooks within the Claude Code environment—to create a “Return to Sender” mechanism.

Instead of OpenClaw maintaining a persistent, expensive connection to the running sub-process, we treat the task as an asynchronous job. We dispatch the intent, and the execution environment becomes responsible for reporting its own completion.

The Dual-Channel Handshake: Data vs. Signal

To make this work in a production-grade agentic stack, we decouple the Data Channel from the Signal Channel.

The Data Channel (Persistence): When the task completes, the hook script serializes the entire session output—logs, diffs, success metrics—into a structured latest.json file. This is our “Post Box.” It ensures that even if the network flickers or the Master Agent is deep in a different context, the state is preserved on disk.
The Signal Channel (Wake Event): Once the data is secured, the hook issues a curl request to the OpenClaw Gateway’s /api/cron/wake endpoint. This is the “Doorbell.” It triggers an immediate interrupt, signaling the Master Agent that the environment has changed and there is data waiting to be ingested.

This architecture—Signal + Persistence—is the “Anti-Amnesia” shield. It allows for “Now” mode (immediate wake-up) or “Next-Heartbeat” mode (scheduled ingestion), depending on the urgency of the task.

Scaling to Agent Teams: The Multi-Role Orchestrator

The real magic happens when you apply this to Agent Teams. Anthropic’s recent updates to Claude Code allow for orchestrated multi-agent development. You are no longer hiring one ghost; you are deploying a squad.

Imagine a scenario where you dispatch a complex request: “Build a high-frequency trading simulation with a React frontend and a Rust backend.”

In the old paradigm, your Master Agent would be paralyzed for thirty minutes while this ran. In the Zero-Polling paradigm, the Master Agent dispatches the task to a Claude Code Team and immediately pivots to analyzing market news or drafting a different strategy. Six minutes later, the SessionEnd hook fires, the doorbell rings, and the Master Agent receives a summary: “Infrastructure deployed. Frontend accessible at localhost:3000. All tests passed.”

Strategic Implications for the Enterprise

For the “Digital Strategist,” the takeaway is clear: Agency is only as good as its orchestration.

If your organization is building agents that require human-in-the-loop for every iteration, you aren’t building agents; you’re building sophisticated macros. True agentic maturity is reached when the system can self-correct, self-report, and—most importantly—self-suspend when the work is done.

We are entering the age of Autonomous Deployment. The terminal is becoming a background process. Your job is no longer to write the code, or even to prompt the code. Your job is to design the hooks that allow the code to write itself while you are busy designing the next frontier.

The ghosts are in the machine. Stop watching them work. Start letting them report.

Operational Briefing:

Primary Tooling: OpenClaw + Claude Code (Official Anthropic CLI).
Core Mechanism: latest.json persistence + Gateway Wake API.
Economic Impact: 80% reduction in “Idle Polling” token consumption.
Status: Production Ready.

Stay sharp. Stay chaotic.