Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent

來源原標題

Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent

作者

Xeophon

原始標籤

hackernews

來源訊號

HN points 174　HN 留言 32

原始連結

https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/prime-agent

摘要原文

Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent Today, we are launching Prime Agent , our self-improving coding harness designed around two abstractions, the Recursive Language Model (RLM) [ citation ] and Continual Harness [ citation ]. Modern harness designs were built around the capabilities of earlier generations of models, and they do not reflect what frontier models can do today: fixed tool-calling schemas and context compaction force the model to work around its own scaffolding instead of leveraging it. Static, hand-engineered sub-agents, prompts, skills, and memory are set once at design time and never adapt to what the agent learns while running. We believe that harnesses should instead extrapolate on current model capabilities toward the next frontier of reasoning patterns. Prime Agent is built around this principle through two main abstractions: The Recursive Language Model (RLM) treats context as a variable and subagent delegation as function calls inside a REPL. The persistent REPL gives the model programmatic access to its history, sub-agents, and tools, allowing it to write language model programs as actions over its own context. This design allows the agent to process arbitrarily long sessions without losing access to its own past information stored in variables. Continual Harness treats the harness's own state, abstracted as its prompts, skills, memory, and sub-agents, as something the agent can create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) from its own trajectory. When combined with agent-to-agent communication, this mechanism enables orchestration across sub-agents and even across Prime Agent sessions. For example, Prime Agent can spawn persistent sub-agents, message them later in the trajectory, and communicate directly with a different Prime Agent session. These abstractions are powerful for bootstrapping model capabilities. Prime Agent is built to be effective as a general coding assistant, as a default runtime for long-horizon autonomous evaluation, and as a collaborator for research and autoresearch. Prime Agent is fully open-source , and can be installed via: curl -fsSL https://app.primeintellect.ai/prime-agent/install.sh | sh Prime Agent The performance of agent harnesses are tied to both the design of the harness and the capability of the model trained around the harness. We designed Prime Agent to be immediately usable with modern open and closed frontier models, while also providing a feature set that we expect to provide further performance gains as newer generations of models are trained around it. At its core, Prime Agent is designed around programmatic tool and sub-agent calling. Models in Prime Agent use a persistent IPython kernel as their only tool. Other standard harness features are called as functions in the kernel, including sub-agents, which are each implemented as another prime-agent instance. Prime Agent's Architecture RLM and Continual Harness are the two core abstractions; sub-agent CRUD plus Agent2Agent messaging compose them into orchestration. Background Daemon and Agents View. The default view is a text-user interface (TUI) similar to other coding agent harnesses. By default, IPython actions made by the agent are condensed for brevity, but can be expanded to view actions made by the harness. Sub-agents launched in the REPL can also be accessed below the user chatbox. Prime Agent runs a background daemon that owns all live agent sessions over a local socket. You can attach and detach from the session without affecting the underlying agent loop. Each root session tree runs in a recoverable worker process; if a worker crashes, the daemon recovers it from the session JSONL and kernel state snapshot. The Agents View allows you to see and select other live sessions from the daemon. It can be opened by pressing the Left Arrow key (←) on an empty prompt, and lists sessions that are currently running, idle sessions with the daemon still active, and inactive sessions that are currently not loaded in memory. Any of these chats can immediately be entered and interacted with, and pressing space allows users to chat with a session in any state, including steering and queuing of prompts and commands such as /compact . The Agents View is constructed as the central connecting point between agents and subagents, recursively. Any agent is discoverable in an Agents View. Users navigate from an Agents View into an agent's chat, then into the Agents View of its subagents, into a subagent chat, and so on. Because subagents share the same Running-Idle-Inactive state machine as the root agents, they can be removed from memory after 30 minutes of inactivity, and the moment a user or agent addresses any of them, they are reloaded from disk. In highly nested chats, this can save a lot of memory. Session and Context Management. The entire session history of the agent is stored as append-only JSONL files on disk. Each line is a JSON entry, which can include messages, model switches, compaction summaries, or extension entries. Branching, forking, and cloning all happen within the same file by moving the leaf pointer. The full history is always recoverable through /tree . Compaction happens when the context hits a threshold or directly by the agent in the REPL with compact.run() . Compaction is primarily used to clean the main context of the agent, but the full history, including past compactions, can be accessed programmatically in the IPython kernel when needed. The introduction of the REPL requires additional work to manage the IPython state. We asynchronously compact and clean the kernel simultaneously, using a spawned agent to act as a garbage collector. This is necessary to avoid REPL memory built up for each agent. RLM and Programmatic Tool-Calling (PTC) Prime Agent relies on the IPython kernel as its REPL that persists over the session, which it can invoke every turn. On initialization, the kernel pre-imports each skill / tool as a module, including the rlm for recursive programmatic sub-agent calling. The rlm is an asynchronous function, meaning the model can freely invoke and parallelize sub-agent calls in code. Spawning a subagent (e.g. await rlm("sub-task") ) launches a full session with its own model, IPython kernel, session tree, and conversation history. It returns immediately, because all subsequent communication between agents happens through the agent_message.send(...) tool. There are several useful primitives that Prime Agent can choose to launch in this way, such as fanning out sub-agents in parallel, or launching background work. # Parallel fan-out — rlm() returns at task admission with a child handle, # never the child's answer; results arrive as agent_message replies. auth = await rlm ( "Summarize the authentication flow in auth/. Reply to me when done." , name = "auth-expert" ) api = await rlm ( "Summarize the updated HTTP API layer in src/. Reply to me when done." , name = "http-expert" ) # ... continue independent work; each child replies via # agent_message.send(..., receiver_role="parent") when finished ... # Steer or extend a child mid-flight by role + name await agent_message . send ( "Also cover middleware error handling." , receiver_role = "child" , receiver_name = api . name , ) As models continue to improve, new invocation patterns over tool calls and sub-agents will emerge. We expect future generations of models to rely less on hand-holding prompts and more on this kind of direct, programmatic control. Orchestration and Multi-Agent Communication The background daemon manages all live Prime Agent sessions. Prime Agent also enables Agent-to-Agent (A2A) messaging through the daemon, letting any Prime Agent session message any other Prime Agent session using the same mechanism used for messaging persistent sub-agents. This allows for easy orchestration to manage the progress of sub-agent swarms and communication regarding shared resources directly between the affected agents. (174 points, 32 comments on Hacker News)