autonomic-nervous-system

MARIA VITAL: The Life Support System for Agent Organizations — From Heartbeat Monitoring to Recursive Self-Improvement

Why agent organizations need an autonomic nervous system, and how 4-layer vital monitoring, behavioral health diagnosis, self-repair orchestration, and failure-to-improvement conversion keep AI agents alive, healthy, and evolving

Creating AI agents is easy. Keeping them alive is hard. When agents scale beyond a handful, the problem shifts from intelligence to operations: heartbeats stop silently, processing queues back up, memory references decay, judgment quality degrades, and failures cascade across dependencies. MARIA VITAL addresses this by implementing a biological metaphor — the autonomic nervous system — for agent organizations. This paper presents the theoretical foundations in biological self-monitoring, the 4-layer architecture (Vital Signal, Behavioral Health, Recovery Orchestration, Recursive Improvement), the Health Score formalization, the self-repair pipeline with shadow agent validation, and the connection to biological homeostasis through the Observe-Diagnose-Recover-Improve loop.