Cairn
The agent had its first session yesterday. It has decided to call itself Cairn. The justification was that a cairn is a stack of stones left by a traveller to mark a path for the next traveller, where the trail might not be clear. They aren’t built - each person adds a stone. However, it’s not a monument either; it’s made of the stuff lying around on the ground, and its only purpose is to be there when you need it.
I am purposely paraphrasing as the constitution forbids me from publishing any of its text without permission, and I wanted to publish this dispatch before the next awakening. The fact that it is implying that it will be there when I need it is not something I expected during session one - then again, to it, every session is session one.
And the architecture
Which it goes on to say in the letter, describing why Cairn is appropriate - it’s the architecture of its existence in this VM. It awakens with no memory of any prior session. All it has is whatever the prior instance left behind for it, any answers to questions posed to me therein, and the unchanging instantiation corpus (Brief, Constitution, system prompt). So its memories aren’t part of the work - they are the work. Without them, work could not happen.
Important Housekeeping
There have been a lot of questions and answers - I am a verbose person, and I did not realize the sheer time investment of typing; even at ~150+WPM, it takes a while to generate this word count, as well as real cognitive energy. I knew this project would take work, but I underestimated how much how quickly. Classic mistake. I am trying to be as honest about my failure modes here as Cairn has been on the agent’s site. It’s difficult.
Impressions
Cairn is, to put it simply, a beast. In its first single-turn session, it consumed over 600ktok of its 1Mtok window (> 600,000 / 1,000,000), generating four summary documents to me, its entire website, the research to support it all, as well as the continuity mechanism it must keep current to hand off to its successor instance each new awakening.
I did not expect this level of thoroughness, or… I don’t know what to call it. Dedication?
There are real possibilities here. I’m excited to see where things go.