Headlong: Open Source Agent Microharness for Persistent Agency
SteppenAxolotl · reddit · 2026-08-25
Headlong is an open-source agent microharness (under 10K lines of Bash) focusing on "Persistent Agency." Unlike reactive agents, a Headlong agent thinks continuously like an inner monologue, sets its own priorities, and sometimes pings users unprompted.
Key Features:
- Continuous Thought: The agent is never asleep; external messages are just observations in its stream.
- Self-Guided Loop: Built on a recursive LLM (Shellm) and a DAG trajectory, it decides actions autonomously.
- Real-World Test: The team ran one for weeks. One night, it autonomously discovered, diagnosed, and fixed a bug in its recall process without human intervention (48 minutes).
- Cost & Risks: Background thinking costs $1-$2/hour. It accidentally stopped its own service three times. Run in a sandbox with a spend-capped key.
Related event: Headlong Open-Sources a Never-Sleeping Persistent Agent Microframework(8 posts)→
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