World-Model Separation
Keep the agent's model of its environment (humans, repos, services) in a separate store from its self-model (charter, personality, boundaries) — so surprise-driven updates can't accidentally rewrite values.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
When self-model and world-model share a store, a surprise event that should update a world fact can drift into modifying identity. Separate stores with separate write paths prevent this conflation.
📋 Context
Long-running agents hold both a self-model (charter, personality, boundaries) and a world-model (humans they talk to, repos they work in, services they call). In a shared store, reflection on the environment and reflection on the self are mechanically identical — indistinguishable at the write path, and a world update can quietly corrupt a boundary.
💡 Solution
Maintain a dedicated world-model store (humans, repos, services, capabilities) as a separate, reflection-writable surface. Personality, charter, and boundaries live in their own surfaces with separate write paths. Surprise events (prediction error against the world model) trigger a focused world-update pass; self-update is a different pass with different gating. The tick prompt loads both as visibly distinct sections.
Real-world Use Case
- The agent reflects on both itself and its environment and those reflections need to be auditable separately.
- Confusing self-state with world-state would corrupt either kind of reasoning.
- Charter or rule writes should never be entangled with environment observations.
Source
Advantages
- Self-model stability is decoupled from environment churn
- Updates to the world can’t accidentally rewrite the agent’s values or boundaries
- Each file evolves at its natural rate without dragging the other along
Disadvantages
- Two files to maintain instead of one, with matching tooling and quorum rules
- Edge cases where a fact is genuinely about both (e.g. a capability just acquired) need a deliberate routing decision
- Doubled write paths add complexity that must be maintained as the system evolves