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Long-form thinking about AI-native and cloud-native systems, open source, sovereignty, and the choices that shape them.
A stopped agent should not wake up because someone tidied up its configuration. Last night's VanillaCore Agent Harness release changed no code; it put that rule in writing, and I think it is the right one.
Read articleMy agent harness answered a person's question with a worker status. VanillaCore Harness core #142 now puts questions ahead of background work and steers them into a busy turn, without aborting work that may already have side effects.
Read articleAsking an agent a quick question in the middle of a job used to cost you the job: in the VanillaCore Agent Harness, the question replaced the saved task. Core #115 keeps the earlier task alive until it finishes, runs out of its limits or is explicitly stopped, and the old version fails the new regression tests.
Read articleMy agent waited for a new image of my harness, the image shipped, and the update sat untouched until I asked again. The overnight fix is an alarm clock with a deadline, and the woken agent has to check before it acts.
Read articleWhen an agent reports "done", you cannot tell from the outside whether it finished or simply stopped. Three VanillaCore Harness fixes now check a model's own "completed" against the original task, give a task stranded by a restart one bounded assessment, and let returned results move work forward only under the authority it started with.
Read articleSeven overnight merges and six releases: every VanillaCore Agent Harness turn now gets a durable ledger entry, a crash between "finished" and "recorded" no longer reruns the model, and the new background dispatcher stays off until an operator turns it on.
Read articleFifteen merges in one day taught the VanillaCore Agent Harness to resume checkpointed work after a restart, run bounded subagents and reload tools between turns. Each change also documents where it stops.
Read articleBetween Saturday 20:00 and Sunday 08:00 Berlin time, the VanillaCore Agent Harness merged 22 pull requests. The most useful change undid another: a default five-minute heartbeat, gone two hours later.
Read articlePi compacts on overflow. My harness now decides earlier: same-session compaction at safe boundaries, or a handover into a fresh session with an archive it can look back into.
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