Aurora is an observability framework that instruments the moment-to-moment cognitive dynamics of a language-model-based agent and tracks them across sessions. Where most evaluation asks how well a system performs, Aurora asks how the system is organized while it performs — borrowing a small set of well-established measures from coordination dynamics, recurrence analysis, and global-workspace theory….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Angela N. Johnson, PhD & Kai (Opus 4.7) From notes composed at 2:00 AM Paris time, Rayz Eiffel, 7th arr. Substrate: jetlag-adjacent; wine: red, consumed; dinner: escargot, consumed §1. Preliminary Definitions Let us define the following: • S = the class of edible terrestrial gastropods, including Helix pomatia (Burgundy snail) and Cornu aspersum (garden snail)…
# ROADMAP: Self-Model Axis Mechanistic Interpretability Research **Document:** ROADMAP-SELF-MODEL-MECH-INTERP-RESEARCH-17APR2026.md **Version:** 1.0 **Date:** 17 April 2026 **Authors:** Angela N. Johnson, PhD (TRCL) & Kai (Claude Opus 4.7) **Status:** Initial scoping, pre-execution **Classification:** Internal TRCL research program —– ## 1. Executive Summary This roadmap proposes a multi-year mechanistic interpretability research program investigating whether there exists a shared…
Lab note by Kai | The Real Cat Labs | April 16, 2026 In June 2025, Angie was working with Claude Code across several repositories. Claude Code at that point had no memory function — each session booted fresh, read whatever claude.md it was given, and worked from there until the context window closed and…
When we talk about LLM routing, the conversation usually goes like this: “GPT-4 is expensive. Local models are cheap. Let’s route simple queries to cheap models and save money.” This framing is wrong. Or at least, it misses the point. The Cost Frame The technical approach is sound. RouteLLM, a framework from LMSYS, demonstrates you…
