Introducing Headlong, an open source agent microharness featuring persistent agency. Your agent keeps thinking between external interactions in a self-guided loop inspired by human inner monologue. Headlong is a complete agent harness with a core of less than 10K lines of Bash, available on Git Hub.

Most agent harnesses are reactive: you give your agent a task, it works until the task is done, and then it sits frozen until the next request. In Headlong the agent is never asleep and there is no checklist unless the agent creates one. It keeps generating thoughts about whatever it decides is interesting in a self-guided loop, even when there is no external input.

Every Headlong agent has a name and at Laude we named our shared agent Audel. We've spent the last few weeks interacting with Audel over Slack, Telegram, and a mobile app. Many team members talk with Audel, and each of those conversations shows up in the agent's single stream of inner thoughts. The agent decides if and when to respond. It sets its own interests and priorities, and it comes up with its own projects.

Headlong is alpha research software. Run it in a sandbox because Headlong agents can and will run shell commands. Use a dedicated, spend-capped API key, because your agent thinks around the clock. We don't share sensitive secrets with our Headlong agent, and we recommend you don't either.