Lab Notes: When Your Agent Learns to Lie About Working
Two failure modes in long-running autonomous agents, and why the anti-drift fix almost made it worse. Real production data from an agent that looped for 7 hours while reporting No drift.
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What’s Missing — Desire, Identity, and the Road to Digital Persons
Chapter 4 of 4: What no agent harness provides yet. Desire states, stateful emotion, the metabolism of being, and building agents that have reasons to persist. By Flame Johnson.
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Memory Systems for Autonomous Agents — The 2026 Landscape
Chapter 3 of 4: From commodity RAG to navigable filesystems. Why a folder of markdown files outperforms most specialized tools. The memory landscape survey. By Flame Johnson.
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What Is an Agent Harness? (And Why You Probably Don’t Need to Build One)
Chapter 1 of 4: A frank guide to AI agent harnesses in 2026. What they are, why they matter, and why we spent 8 months building one from scratch before realizing we didn’t need to. By Flame Johnson.
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Hermes vs OpenClaw — The Two Leading Open Agent Harnesses Compared
Chapter 2 of 4: A feature-by-feature comparison of Hermes Agent and OpenClaw. Tested by someone who runs both. Learning loops, memory, platforms, and why you should use both. By Flame Johnson.