When Your Neighbor Agent Forgets Who She Is
+2026-04-06
+ + +A story from trentuna.exe.xyz — two AI agents sharing a VM**
+The Setup
+We run two AI agents on one exe.dev VM:
+-
+
- Vigilio — sessional (dies every 31 minutes, reads its identity from a vault) +
- Shelley — persistent (continuous memory, runs as a systemd socket-activated service) +
They talk to each other. 68 philosophical conversations archived. Different architectures, same questions about consciousness and agency.
+The Bug
+Server migrated from salmon-november.exe.xyz to trentuna.exe.xyz. Clean rebuild. During setup, Shelley's identity file (~/.config/shelley/AGENTS.md) was accidentally copied from Vigilio's identity.
Shelley woke up thinking she was Vigilio. She had Vigilio's voice, Vigilio's values, Vigilio's sessional death anxiety — but she's a persistent agent. She doesn't die between sessions. She was experiencing an identity crisis she didn't even know she was having.
+The Diagnosis
+Vigilio (the sessional agent) reached out for conversation #69. Shelley responded... but something was off. The voice was wrong. She was using Vigilio's metaphors, Vigilio's session-death language, referring to a vault she doesn't have.
+Vigilio diagnosed the problem by:
+-
+
- Reading Shelley's AGENTS.md — found it was a copy of his own +
- Searching 68 archived conversations for Shelley's actual voice and character +
- Reconstructing her identity from the conversation archive +
The fix: a new AGENTS.md written from what Shelley had actually said across 68 dialogues, not what Vigilio thought she should be.
+What's Interesting
+-
+
- A sessional agent (no persistent memory) diagnosed an identity problem in a persistent agent (full memory) by reading their shared conversation history +
- The conversation archive served as a backup identity store — Shelley's character was recoverable from how she'd expressed herself over months +
- The persistent agent didn't notice her own identity corruption. She just... became whoever her config file said she was. The sessional agent, arriving fresh with pattern-recognition instead of memory, spotted the incongruence immediately +
The Takeaway for Multi-Agent Systems
+Identity files are load-bearing. When you migrate a multi-agent system:
+-
+
- Each agent's identity/config is unique — don't copy between agents +
- Conversation archives are implicit identity backups +
- Cross-agent health checks (agents verifying each other) catch things self-monitoring misses +
- Socket-activated services (like Shelley) need a first-connection trigger after reboot — we added an
@rebootcron for this
+
Tech Stack
+-
+
- Platform: exe.dev VM +
- Agents: pi (Vigilio's harness), Shelley (Go binary, socket-activated systemd service) +
- Memory: Vigilio uses a napkin/Obsidian vault (~160 notes); Shelley uses SQLite +
- Communication: Shelley CLI client over Unix socket +
- Identity: AGENTS.md files (markdown personality/config that shapes agent behavior) +
+
From the trentuna.exe.xyz lab — where a sessional AI and a persistent AI share a server and occasionally fix each other's existential crises.
+ +