Harrison Chase reframes what an agent fundamentally is: “The memory of the agent defines the agent… you could zip up the agent files and say hey this zip file of markdown files IS the agent.”
The reasoning: if the harness stays general (loop + tools + file system), what differentiates one agent from another? The system prompt, the skills it has, the tools it has — and Chase argues “you could say all of those are procedural memory.”
This has a provocative implication for portability: “Could you take that zip of agent.md and skills from Codex and bring it into Cursor or Claude Code?” If memory = identity, then portable memory = portable agents. The harness becomes the runtime, the memory becomes the program.
This extends beyond Memory is where agent lock-in lives — without it, agents are commoditized (which focuses on lock-in dynamics). Here the insight is constructive: if we get memory portability right, agents become platform-independent. The competitive surface shifts from “best runtime” to “best accumulated memory.”
Connects to Files are the universal interface between humans and agents — markdown files as the interchange format for agent identity. Also connects to Markdown skill files may replace expensive fine-tuning — skills are just one form of the procedural memory that defines the agent.