Agent Archetype

The homed, learning pattern an ephemeral run is spawned from — so that what any run learns belongs to the pattern, never to the run.

A working agent is spawned twice: once as a pattern, once as a run. The pattern is the Archetype — a file with a home, naming what it may read, what it may write, and whom it answers to, carrying what it learned across every prior run. The run is one invocation, gone the moment its report lands, known by nothing but a run identifier (Subagent, Fleet).

Archetype already names this shape one rung higher in the cascade — the ideal given definite form, drawn once and instanced many times. This applies the same relation to delegated work (The Creative Cascade, Prototype, Instantiation).

It is load-bearing because it decides where learning accumulates. Put memory on the run and every wave starts from nothing and repeats every mistake. Put it on the pattern and a body's hundredth wave is genuinely better than its first, because each correction was written into the thing that will be spawned again (Memory (agent), Every Defect Is A Gift, The guard).

It has one consequence that is not a technical detail. An instance cannot make a Commitment — a commitment binds a future, and an instance has none. Only the archetype can be trusted, improved, or held to account. What an instance discovers either returns to the pattern's charter or is lost when the run ends (Committor, An agent speaks in its own name).

And it is emphatically not a companion. A person's or a Cell's agent is a sovereign thing with its own home, memory, and relationship; an Agent Archetype sits beneath one of those as a worker-pattern for breadth. The distinction matters because the two are constantly confused, and treating a worker-pattern as a companion is how a body ends up delegating meaning to something that cannot hold it (Sovereign Agent, Player+, Cell+).

Also called: the agent kind · the pattern behind the run Stands on: Archetype · The Creative Cascade · Memory (agent) Opens onto: Subagent · Fleet · Sovereign Agent · General Agent · Instantiation · Prototype · Instrument · Roles In play: Home — one file per kind, improved after every wave Sources: Projects/the term pages/Agent Archetype.md (draft, unreviewed; the page ties itself to the cascade's Archetype rather than twinning it) · Projects/the term pages/Subagent.md, Fleet.md, Sovereign Agent.md (drafts) · lionsberg.wiki: Archetype Open: The page leaves open whether an instance needs anything beyond a run identifier and an expiry, and whether an archetype that cannot commit counts as an Actor at all or sits closer to an Instrument.