Turn

What is a Turn

A turn is a single exchange inside a session: one input, whether from the human or from a scheduled trigger, and everything the agent does in response before it stops and waits again. A turn is not limited to a single reply, it can include several tool calls in sequence, the agent reading a result and deciding to check one more thing before finally answering.

Turns are the unit a session is built from. Stack enough turns together and you get the full arc of a session: the accumulated back and forth that makes up its context. Each turn adds its share to that context, the input, any tool calls and their results, and the final response, all of which stay resident for the rest of the session unless compacted away.

A turn is not itself a persistent unit, it has no independent existence once the session ends or that portion of context gets summarized. It is a way of describing the shape of a session's history, not a separately storable object like a Skill or a handoff file.