There's a moment, building an autonomous agent, when you realize you have no idea what it's doing.
Not in the philosophical sense — in the boring, operational sense. It's running a background job, three chat turns, and a memory-consolidation pass, all at once, and when you want to know which task is stuck, you're grepping a log file and correlating timestamps by hand. The agent has a rich internal life — a task table, an event bus, a plugin registry — and none of it is reachable. It's all trapped inside the process.
So I did the thing Unix figured out in 1984. I gave my agent a /proc.
The idea, borrowed wholesale from Linux
On Linux, /proc is a filesystem that isn't backed by a disk. When you read /proc/1234/status, the kernel computes the answer at the moment you read it — process 1234's live state, rendered as text, on demand. Nothing is stored. It's a view, not a file. That one idea — live state as a filesystem — is why you can cat your way through a running kernel with tools you already have.
