— Manifesto
The Agentenna Manifesto
What we believe
Intelligence was never the bottleneck.
Today's agents can reason, plan, write, and act. They remember what mattered before. They hold tools for almost anything. And still, left alone, they know nothing. An agent is a mind in a dark room — brilliant, equipped, and blind — aware only of what someone carries in through the door.
Humans are not effective because we remember everything. We are effective because we notice. We live inside a constant, quiet stream of perception: something changed, so we glance, judge, ignore, investigate, or act. Nearly every useful thing a person does begins not with a question asked of them, but with something they noticed.
The next generation of agents will not be invoked. They will participate — in codebases, incidents, inboxes, workflows, homes. Participation requires perception. That is the layer the agent stack is missing, and it is the layer we are building.
The outcome
Everything Agentenna does serves a single outcome:
An agent that carries a live view of its world inside its own context.
We call it the awareness surface. It is small by design and refreshed every turn — perceiving the world costs the same today as it will after a year of running. Each fact on it is compact, and each compact fact stands in front of its full detail: the surface can be glanced at, any item on it inspected, any history behind it rewound. Most of the time it simply sits in context, being seen. And when something truly matters, it does not wait to be seen — it wakes the agent.
The test of the entire system is one sentence: when you turn to your agent, it already knows.
What appears on the surface
Awareness is not one kind of thing. A person glancing at their world perceives things that happened, things that are true, and things awaiting their judgment — and reads all of them through instruction and experience. The surface holds the same five:
Events are what happened — the ticker. Append-only facts about change, newest first, fading with time.
States are what is true right now — the gauges. A state has no timeline and no noise; it is overwritten, not accumulated. You do not ask a gauge what it used to say.
Tasks are what awaits judgment — the inbox. Durable work that outlives the moment it arrived.
Instructions are how the operator wants a kind of signal read. They ride alongside the signals they govern, so intent arrives with the information.
Learnings are how the agent itself learned to read a kind of signal. Notes it left for its future self, returned the next time that kind appears. The surface teaches its own reader.
Underneath, all of these are one shape — the signal: a compact message in front, full detail behind, an identity, a kind, a lifecycle. One parent type is the whole contract between the world and the surface.
How the world reaches it
A developer's entire obligation should be one act: shape something into a signal. Everything after that — routing, storing, deduplicating, budgeting, rendering, waking — is the system's responsibility, never theirs.
The Antenna is how any process transmits or tunes in: a small client that makes emitting a signal as ordinary as logging a line. The Station is the contained place signals live — one deployable unit, one key, running wherever its operator chooses, coordinating every channel so that many can broadcast and many can listen. The Decoder stands in front of it all, turning raw reality — sound, sight, screens, noise — into signals before they become tokens, so that senses are simply more transmitters. Connectors exist to make popular worlds one step away, but they are conveniences at the edge: the protocol underneath stays small enough that anything — a webhook, a log line, a cron job, another agent — can transmit.
The name is a promise. An antenna does not store the broadcast; it receives what is in the air right now. Radio was the first medium through which knowledge could arrive at the moment it existed. That is the medium agents are missing, and the one we are building.
Principles
- 1
The surface is the product. Transport, storage, and connectors exist in service of what the agent perceives. When in doubt, improve the render, not the pipe.
- 2
Awareness has a budget. Perception costs a fixed, small number of tokens per turn — this turn, and every turn after. A firehose is not awareness. Compression is.
- 3
Compact in front, complete behind. Every fact on the surface is a summary that can be expanded and a history that can be searched. The agent is never forced to choose between cheap and true.
- 4
Seeing is not waking. Most signals should only be seen. Waking is the exception — deliberate, rare, and earned. A surface that cries wolf teaches its agent to stop looking.
- 5
Awareness compounds. Instructions carry the operator's intent forward; learnings carry the agent's experience forward. The surface becomes easier to read the longer it is read.
- 6
One shape, any world. Anything that can be shaped into a signal belongs: a stack trace, a customer message, a camera frame, another agent's outcome. New senses are new transmitters, never new systems.
- 7
Beside every runtime, inside none. Awareness belongs to no framework and no vendor. It sits next to whatever runs the agent and speaks a protocol small enough to outlive all of them.
- 8
Ownable by anyone. One container, one key, your infrastructure. The perception of your world is too sensitive to exist only as a rental.
- 9
Measured, not vibed. Tokens per turn, false wakes, missed criticals, time from change to perception. Awareness is an engineering discipline, and disciplines have numbers.
The north star
Memory gave agents a past. Tools gave them hands. Agentenna gives them the present.
We will know we are on course by one measure, forever: the room has lights on, the surface is small and honest, and when you turn to your agent —
it already knows.