Headlong: A Microharness for Persistent Agents

Laude and MIT open-sourced Headlong, an agent framework under 10K lines of Bash. Unlike reactive agents that freeze between tasks, Headlong agents keep thinking in a self-guided loop; human messages are just observations dropped into the thought stream. The team shared one agent named Audel for weeks—it sets its own priorities, starts projects, and pings people unprompted. It's alpha research software: run it in a sandbox, use a spend-capped API key, and don't share secrets.

Why it matters: Headlong flips the reactive agent paradigm with a sub-10K-line Bash harness for persistent self-guided thinking. The concept is fresh and the open-source release is concrete. Score capped at 78 because it's still an experimental project with no production data or benchmarks ag...