Skip to content
Review

Code Is the Body: Agent-Owned Software Bodies for Recursive Evolution and Descent

Jul 2026 · arXiv.org · Vol abs/2607.28691 · 0 citations · 19 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

The OurArk architecture for persistent personal agents centered on an agent-owned software body: an identity-bearing, inspectable, and versioned artifact under human custody that provides a concrete substrate for personal agents that people can possess, govern, specialize, and evolve over time.

Abstract

Personalized AI agents are often configurable without giving users control over the artifacts that determine their future behavior. We present OurArk, an architecture for persistent personal agents centered on an agent-owned software body: an identity-bearing, inspectable, and versioned artifact under human custody. The body contains behavior-defining code, prompts, tools, skills, policies, tests, and evolution mechanisms. Memories and credentials remain private instance state, while model inference is treated as a replaceable external service. OurArk defines governed self-evolution and recursive descent over the same body. Self-evolution produces isolated candidate changes that are validated, reviewed, and merged under human control, enabling human-agent co-development of the agent's software body. Descent creates an independently versioned descendant with a distinct identity, mission, history, and fresh private-state boundary; compatible descendants can themselves source further descent. After divergence, direct-parent changes and peer skills can be inspected for selective local adaptation. We implement the architecture in the open-source Genesis creation engine and Enoch reference agent. A four-agent, three-descent linear lineage and executable regression tests demonstrate recursive creation, inherited validation contracts, isolated body changes, human-controlled review, and failed-update recovery. OurArk provides a concrete substrate for personal agents that people can possess, govern, specialize, and evolve over time.

View source

Similar papers

Preprint Aug 2026

Persistent Recursive Worlds Enable Autonomous Software Evolution

Results show that long-horizon software development can be organized around a persistent project rather than a persistent agent, and EvoX Genesis is introduced, which instead makes the software project persistent while allowing local agents to remain finite-lived.

Beichen Huang, Zhenyu Liang, Bowen Zheng et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Runtime-Independent Persistent Agents: Preserving Identity, Memory, and Code Across Models, Harnesses, and Servers

Agent systems are commonly described by the model and harness that currently produce their behavior. That boundary is useful for one execution but underspecifies a long-lived agent that may change models, orchestration harnesses, interaction sessions, and host servers while retaining one identity, memory, and executable code lineage. We present a runtime-independent architecture for persistent agents. A continuity-bearing substrate $P_t=(I_t,M_t,B_t)$ contains an architectural identity representation, private durable memory, and a versioned software body. A replaceable deployment binding comprises an execution substrate $E_t=(R_t,H_t,D_t)$, which supplies a reasoner, harness, and host, and a set of interaction surfaces $S_t$, such as chat, API, or user interface bindings. A deployed execution is $A_t=P_t\triangleright(E_t,S_t)$; changing either replaceable layer is migration, not agent creation, when an authorized protocol preserves attributable lineage and transfers continuation authority within a governed deployment boundary. We define six continuity invariants and a quiesce--checkpoint--validate--bind--rehydrate--resume protocol. Enoch realizes the design as a reusable body plus private installed identity, memory, workflow state, and continuation authority, with infrastructure dependencies behind versioned provider contracts. A clean-room run of the frozen public commit passes 833 core tests and 92 provider and library tests executed separately from the core suite; deployments have exercised reasoner-version, interaction-surface, and host-machine substitutions while retaining continuity-bearing state. This evidence supports mechanical substitutability and authorized system continuity, not behavioral invariance or exhaustive pairwise evaluation. The downstream measurement question is whether an authorized continuation still recalls, composes, and enacts its identity.

Zhe Zhao, Roy Zhao Independent Researcher, P. G. A. S. O. C. ScienceEngineering et al. · 0 citations
Jul 2026

LOGOS: A Living Logic for AI Agent Teams That Evolve With Humans

This work introduces logos, a pluggable layer for self-evolution and governance that strengthens existing multiagent frameworks rather than replacing them, and provides a living logic for accountable automation.

Yuma Ichikawa, Yamato Arai, Kosaku Kimura et al. · 0 citations
Review Aug 2026

Self-Evolving Coding Agents

This survey aims to clarify the conceptual boundaries of self-evolving coding agents and provide a foundation for designing more adaptive, reliable, and software-aware agentic systems.

H. Zhou, Haichuan Hu, Tianyu Luo et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Agent Gym: A Framework for Continuous Evaluation and Evolution of LLM Agents Through Human-in-the-Loop Feedback

Agent Gym is introduced, a modular, domain-agnostic framework that wraps any existing LLM-based agent in a continuous evaluation-and-evolution loop and introduces the Spec-to-Note Gap, an autoencoder-inspired view of agentic system transparency.

Pouya Ghiasnezhad Omran, Michael Zimmermann, Duncan Cambridge et al. · 0 citations
Review Sep 2026

Skill-as-API: Confidential Multi-Agent Coordination for Agentic Software Engineering

AI coding agents are evolving from solitary tools into collaborative teammates that discover and invoke one another's specialized skills. But the coordination channel itself can leak a skill's intellectual property. Protocols such as MCP and A2A run implementations server-side, yet they still publish each skill's description and typed schemas to every peer, offer no way to hide a skill's existence, and cannot guarantee that a wrapped system prompt stays off the wire. Application-layer privacy filters help, but act only after the model has decided to emit sensitive text. We take a complementary, protocol-layer route: Skill-as-API, a coordination protocol whose public view of a skill is limited to its name, description, typed input/output schemas, and trust tier. The skill body is closure-captured in the owner's process and never crosses the wire. Four layers add access control and narrow the prompt-injection surface structurally rather than by filtering content. We provide an open-source Python implementation over XMTP with 1.8-2.9 s cross-continent hot-reconnect latency, and a software-engineering case study in which three agents coordinate a pull-request review while each retains ownership of its proprietary analysis prompts.

Zi-Wei Zhao, Yu Gu, Haofeng Liang et al. · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.