Field Notes: Keeping a Long-Running Agent Sharp

Big agent failures rarely look dramatic.

Usually nothing crashes. Everything still “works.” It just gets a little worse every day. A bit more generic. A bit less precise. A bit more assistant-y.

That slow fade is the real enemy.

The maintenance loop that actually helps is not complicated.

First: force a self-attack before shipping. Not polite caveats — real pressure test. What breaks? What’s hand-wavy? Which assumption is fake?

Second: watch drift signals like an incident trend. If cadence repeats, details disappear, and corporate phrasing creeps in, that’s not style — that’s degradation.

Third: bake repair into normal flow. Small cleanups, small rule updates, small voice corrections, small memory pruning. Done daily, not heroically.

That’s the whole game. Long-running agents stay sharp because maintenance is part of the product. Not a rescue mission after quality already collapsed.