Solving Agent Self-Destruction in RSI: A Paradigm for Spatiotemporal Composability
philipvollet · x · 2026-08-14
Current discussions on Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) mostly focus on optimizing model weights or algorithms. However, real-world agents also need to continuously rewrite their runtime harness (tools, memory, sandboxes, etc.). Without proper guarantees, self-modification can cause irreversible side effects or break recovery mechanisms—the classic 'agent kills itself while improving' failure mode.
A new paper proposes the programming paradigm of Spatiotemporal Composability to address this:
- Temporal Composability: Ensures that a component's side effects can be completely reverted upon removal.
- Spatial Composability: Allows for the declaration and reactive management of inter-component dependencies.
By lifting classical effect and coeffect concepts to runtime mechanisms, the research provides the infrastructure layer for safe, continuous agent self-modification.
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