MODEL-OS · MAPPING 02 / 05
Process Agent
PROCESS ⇢ AGENT AS PROCESS
A process lives as a PID; an agent lives as a goal.
The process is UNIX's great gift to the world: an address space, a PID, a set of file descriptors. Born by fork, transformed by exec, gone at exit. But a process never knows why it is running — the goal exists only in the programmer's head.
The agent writes the goal into the abstraction itself. It is spawned from a sentence of intent, runs with memory, can be suspended into a memory snapshot and awakened on another machine. Its isolation boundary is memory and privilege, not an address space; its priority is the urgency of its goal, not a nice value. The process table becomes a goal table.
Process
- Identified by PID
- fork / exec
- Address-space isolation
- nice-value priority
Agent
- Identified by goal
- Spawned by intent
- Memory isolation
- Goal priority
LIVE · THE SAME JOB, SAID TWO WAYS
Spawn and reap
Spawned by a sentence of intent; reaped when the goal completes or expires. Lifecycle is semantic.
Agent teams
Process groups evolve into crews: planner, executor, reviewer sharing one goal context — a small organization.
A crash is a snapshot
Agents don't segfault — their state is memory. Recovery means resuming thought from the last snapshot.