Governed Evolution of Agent Runtimes through Executable Operational Cognition
For researchers and engineers building adaptive multi-agent systems, this work provides a conceptual foundation for auditable and constrained runtime evolution, though it remains a theoretical proposal without empirical validation.
The paper addresses the under-specified governance and lifecycle management of agent-generated code artifacts in multi-agent systems, proposing a framework called HarnessMutation for governed runtime evolution. It formalizes artifacts as persistent runtime capabilities and models evolution as a bounded, observable process with validation, traceability, and rollback constraints.
Recent advances in agentic systems increasingly treat code as an executable operational substrate rather than as a disposable output artifact. Prior work such as \emph{Code as Agent Harness} frames validated agent-generated artifacts as runtime entities that can be created, executed, revised, persisted, and reused within long-running cognitive loops. However, the governance, lifecycle management, and operational evolution of such artifacts remain under-specified. This paper proposes a framework for governed runtime evolution in multi-agent systems through executable operational cognition. We formalize agent-generated artifacts as persistent runtime capabilities that progressively become part of the operational substrate rather than transient intermediate outputs. Building on this perspective, we introduce \emph{HarnessMutation} as a governed mechanism for lifecycle-aware runtime adaptation operating under explicit validation, traceability, evaluation, and rollback constraints. Rather than treating runtime adaptation as unrestricted self-modification, the proposed framework models evolution as a bounded and observable process over persistent operational memory. It further shows how these ideas can be operationalized over modern agent runtimes and governance-oriented orchestration systems, providing a conceptual foundation for adaptive infrastructures whose evolution remains explicit, auditable, and constrained.