Note 08 · ai
Agents need a kernel, not a personality
Engineering agents accumulate tribal knowledge until they are unmaintainable. The fix is a small kernel plus a project-specific profile.
Most agent prompts grow. They grow because every new lesson becomes a new instruction. Eventually the prompt is thousands of tokens of opaque context and only the author can use it.
Universal Engineering Agent splits this in two. The kernel holds the universal parts — inspect, plan, implement, verify, classify, recover, test, generalize. The profile holds the project-specific parts — language, deployment policy, safety tier. Profiles are inspectable, versionable, and small.
The result is an agent that survives the test of time without becoming a maintenance liability.