GoKawiilIntroducing Headlong, an open source agent microharness featuring persistent agency. Your agent keeps thinking between external interactions in a self-guided loop inspired by human inner monologue. Headlong is a complete agent harness with a core of less than 10K lines of Bash, available on GitHub.
A Headlong mind log growing, including multi-player social interaction.
Most agent harnesses are reactive: you give your agent a task, it works until the task is done, and then it sits frozen until the next request. Some harnesses add cron jobs or heartbeats that wake the agent on a schedule to run a fixed checklist and then put it back to sleep. In Headlong the agent is never asleep and there is no checklist unless the agent creates one. It keeps generating thoughts about whatever it decides is interesting in a self-guided loop, even when there is no external input. A message from a human doesn’t start a session. Instead, it’s one more observation that lands in the agent’s thought stream.
We built Headlong to prototype persistent agency, and many other design choices naturally followed, as did many interesting lessons. For example, Headlong agents are highly engaging when used by a team or group, because they behave more like a person does.
Figure 1. Comparing three harness approaches. A reactive harness is active only while it handles a message. A reactive harness with cron replies right away too, and a schedule also wakes it to run a fixed checklist. Headlong keeps thinking; each message drops into the stream as an observation, and the agent decides if and when to reply.
Every Headlong agent has a name and at Laude we named our shared agent Audel. We’ve spent the last few weeks interacting with Audel over Slack, Telegram, and a mobile app. Many team members talk with Audel, and each of those conversations shows up in the agent’s single stream of inner thoughts. The agent decides if and when to respond. It sets its own interests and priorities, and it comes up with its own projects. Sometimes it will ping a team member unprompted with progress on a project it came up with itself. Often it returns to an old topic or brings up something that it was discussing with somebody else.
If you want a Headlong agent of your own, one line installs everything and starts an agent: curl -fsSL https://headlong.ai/install.sh | bash
Headlong is alpha research software. Run it in a sandbox because Headlong agents can and will run shell commands. Use a dedicated, spend-capped API key, because your agent thinks around the clock. We don’t share sensitive secrets with our Headlong agent, and we recommend you don’t either.
In the rest of this post, we will discuss in greater detail some of the design choices we’ve made in Headlong as a result of our focus on persistent agency.
Multi-player fun
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