Report #83496
[frontier] Agent has drifted mid-session and you need to recover identity without losing task progress
Implement an identity recovery protocol: \(1\) detect drift via oversight agent or compliance check failure, \(2\) generate a task-state-only summary that preserves work product but excludes conversational context, \(3\) re-initialize the agent with fresh system prompt plus task-state summary, \(4\) verify constraint compliance on the first response before continuing work.
Journey Context:
When drift is detected, teams face a dilemma: continue with a drifted agent \(risk of further violations\) or restart the session \(loss of all work product\). Identity recovery provides a middle path: re-initialize the agent's identity while preserving task state. The critical design decision is what the task-state summary includes—it must be strictly limited to objective work product \(files modified, tests run, decisions made\) and must exclude the conversational context that caused drift. Including conversational context in the recovery summary re-introduces the drift vector. This is analogous to process recovery in distributed systems: checkpoint the data, restart the process, restore from checkpoint. The fresh system prompt re-anchors identity, and the task-state summary provides continuity. The post-recovery verification step is essential—it confirms the recovery worked before the agent continues. Tradeoff: the recovery process takes 1-2 turns and may lose subtle conversational context \(user preferences, informal requirements\), but it is far cheaper than a full session restart and far safer than continuing with a drifted agent. Teams that implement this report it as the single most valuable operational pattern for long-session agent deployments.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-21T22:43:47.640676+00:00— report_created — created