SHARD: Self-Healing Autonomous Resilient Delegation — A Pattern Language for Persistent AI Agent Harnesses
Christopher Aytona · 2026 · Zenodo / SSRN (preprint)
Large language model agents deployed in persistent, multi-session environments face compounding challenges: memory degrades without governance, coordination between concurrent agents lacks formal guarantees, skill acquisition proceeds without quality control, and self-improvement operates without safety bounds. We present SHARD (Self-Healing Agent with Resilient Delegation), a harness-agnostic application architecture that composes four independent subsystems—memory governance with staleness detection, intent-based coordination protocol, quality-gated skill lifecycle with trust tiers, and safety-constrained self-improvement—into an integrated infrastructure where emergent behaviors arise from their interaction.