Agent Lifecycle Flow
How an agent harness processes one turn — and which problems fire at which stage. Step through the pipeline; amber warnings show the failure modes tagged at each stage.
Key learning: the densest problem zones are Think (drift, wrong salience), the whole context path (Inject → Observe → Compact — constraints enter and quietly leave), and the self-improvement loop (Journal → Distill → Gate). That's where guardrails pay first.
Turn Log
Context Window & Compaction
Why compaction silently erases constraints. Fill the window with messages and tool results, then watch what survives a compaction pass — and what doesn't.
[SYSTEM] pinned, never compacted
user msg
tool result
summarized — constraints may be gone
evicted