Part 5 of the "Agent Influence" series. Previous | Series start
I used to think LLMs would remember everything in their context and execute accordingly. Then I watched them forget, selectively lose track, hallucinate in long tasks, and sometimes just make things up to get through. That's when I started building what I didn't yet have a name for.
This week I read a DEV Community post titled "What is an 'agentic harness,' actually?" The post itself was brief. But one comment gave me a better way to name what I had been building:
"My version of that surviving layer is a set of standing rules and hooks the agents inherit every session — the stuff that stays true after the conversation is gone."
That quote is from FromZeroToShip. It described something I'd been building for months - a personal agent governance system with standing rules injected every session, a correction memory that outlives any single conversation, and verification scripts I require after the agent reports completion. The title of this article is my own shorthand for that surviving layer.
