Stop Passing Files Between Agents With Local Paths

Short summary

Agents running in production containers and serverless environments cannot rely on local filesystem persistence. The solution: build an artifact store—object storage (S3/R2) paired with a metadata table tracking session, agent, content-type, expiry, and stable retrieval IDs. This pattern progresses from naïve file uploads to deduplication, idempotency, and shareable links.

• •Local file persistence hides a critical gap: production containers and serverless functions have ephemeral filesystems that reset on retry
• •Artifact store pattern: object storage + metadata table + API gives you queryable context (session_id, agent_id, TTL, content_hash) instead of just filepath
• •Progressive pattern: start with S3 + content hashing for dedup, add metadata table, then handle idempotency keys and presigned URLs for production safety

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.