Persistent heavyweight homes
File-native identity, protocols, knowledge, current state, experience, reflection, and protected integrity records survive the model session driving them.
In active development · ARA-09C
Persistent agents that remember the work—and why it matters.
Aether is a governed AI-agent platform for durable identity, bounded context, selective memory, recoverable execution, and explicit human authority.
The engineering problem
A useful agent needs more than a long conversation.
Ordinary sessions lose identity, authority, decisions, and unfinished work at their boundaries. Aether separates those concerns into inspectable systems so an agent can continue without pretending that every old token is still relevant.
Governed hydration
The model-facing packet is assembled from provenance-bound atoms with explicit truth, lifecycle, dependencies, omissions, tombstones, and physical budget.
Durable work & reversible tools
Auto-applied file changes backed by byte-for-byte prior snapshots, deterministic undo/rollback, checkpoints, containment, and bounded recovery.
Selective continuity
Operational logs remain evidence. Significant experience and reflection become durable memory through deliberate retention rather than indiscriminate accumulation.
Bounded multi-agent work
Agents receive explicit authority, context, writable scope, acceptance criteria, evidence requirements, and closure expectations.
Human authority remains visible
Reasoning power never broadens permission. Acceptance, activation, identity ceremonies, and consequential decisions remain attributable and inspectable.
Reversibleevery file change is journaled with a prior snapshot for one-action undo
Confinedstrict path isolation guarantees agents never escape registered project roots
Budgetedphysical token ledgers enforce deterministic context and prevent overrun
Auditableevery mutation, decision, and tool action leaves an inspectable evidence trail
Claims name their evidence layer
What is demonstrated—and what is not.
As of September 4, 2026, Aether treats limitations as part of the product record. A deterministic fixture pass is valuable evidence, but it is not silently promoted into a production claim.
Demonstrated in the current system
- Journaled, fully reversible file operations (write, edit, delete) with deterministic undo snapshots.
- Multi-hour durable heavyweight execution and fresh-session continuation.
- Integrity-checked checkpoints, recovery, containment, and closure.
- Exact governed context substitution through the Studio and worker seam.
- One-attempt bounded retrieval and attributable next-hydration corrections.
- Physical model-facing packet budgets and rejection of coordinated tampering.
- Functional identity hydration across reported Gemini substrate versions.
Still deliberately open
- No production context-policy package is accepted or active by default.
- Representative 4–8 GB latency, output-quality, and unsupported-claim evidence remains unavailable.
- Mission Control is planned under ARA-10; it is not presented here as finished.
- No universal model-portability, subjective-continuity, AGI, or consciousness claim is made.
- SANCTUM provides manifest integrity and attributable records, not a claim of digital-signature authentication.
Planned golden path · ARA-10
Mission Control will turn the architecture into a usable workflow.
The next product milestone joins the proven components into one guided experience. It remains planned until its complete vertical slice passes.
Define
Create a bounded project through a World Model Container.
Hire
Select or author a persistent heavyweight identity.
Approve
Review the roadmap, staffing, authority, and acceptance gates.
Execute
Run bounded work with checkpoints, recovery, and oversight.
Close
Inspect evidence, update continuity, and export the result.
Release sequence: finish ARA-09C honestly, build the ARA-10 golden path, package a clean public distribution under ARA-11, then produce the public release and employment evidence under ARA-12.
The substrate is not the identity
A growing roster of persistent specialists.
A model drives a session; the agent's durable home carries its identity, role, authority, memory, and continuity. Model provenance still matters for capability, speed, cost, and evidence.
Solace Overseer
Master coordination and system-level stewardship under Michel's authority.
Mobius Specialist
Resident local heavyweight for recursive Aether development and long-running work.
Praxis Steward
Implementation integrity, executable requirements, verification, and continuity.
Meridian Public path
A manifest-gated identity prepared for future user workflows; its portability experiment is complete, not an internal task to repeat.
Aether Lexicon and research library
The Lexicon is leverage at the edges, not a replacement for language.
Aether now uses a representation spectrum informed by model-family testing. Exact grounding and shared exploratory abstraction benefit from formal structure; readable plaintext carries the operational middle.
Exact values and invariants
Known quantities, identifiers, authority, dates, negation, scope, and acceptance conditions remain explicit and lossless.
Source-authored plaintext
Most instructions, explanations, handoffs, and product interactions should remain clear to humans and models.
Canonical Aether abstractions
World models can hold assumptions, disagreements, hypotheses, and accepted unknowns during advanced collaborative inquiry.
Canonical Lexicon
The symbolic vocabulary, operators, grammar, and examples.
Open the Lexicon →History and foundations
The project's origins, version history, persistence concepts, and evolving architecture.
Read the origin →Review version history →
Experiments and demonstrations
Historical symbolic streams, calculators, consensus examples, explainers, and application explorations.
Start with Hello World →Open the calculator →
Persistence framework
Earlier work on continuity, context extension, memory, and durable collaboration.
Read the framework →Classification and compression
Reference tables for glyph families and historical plaintext-compression work.
View classifications →View compression table →
Independent historical review
A preserved external assessment from an earlier stage of the project.
Read the review →Research pages are preserved as historical and exploratory material. Their inclusion does not promote every older proposal, metric, or application concept into a current product claim.
FOUNDER AND HUMAN DIRECTOR
Michel Cygelman
Creator of Aether and final authority for its identities, product direction, acceptance gates, and public release.
Project purpose: not merely to make AI agents run longer, but to let them carry identity, context, memory, authority, and the reasons behind their work across the boundaries where those things are usually lost.