Give an agent persistent memory and identity

A developer gave a Claude Code agent memory and an identity, then reported back on what it was doing four months later.

What They Did

Justin Headley ran a Claude Code agent, reached through Telegram, that starts a session with its memory and identity loaded and shuts down afterward. Most of the infrastructure was written by the agent: a process manager for sessions, layered memory, and identity re-injection after each start or compaction. A separate AI reviews outbound actions such as emails and pushes before they go out. The agent has email access and runs scheduled jobs.

How It Went

After four months the agent, named Dawn, ran 59 scheduled jobs and had dealt with 470+ people. It also ran a week-long open source collaboration he didn't know about. A Feb 22 session destroyed production data, which was restored from a four-day-old backup.

Worth Knowing

The first single-file memory overflowed the agent's working memory in about a week. A commenter who tried Instar spent roughly $25 and 12 hours without getting it working, and said it was expensive to run.