Shepherd: A Runtime Substrate Empowering Meta-Agents with a Formalized Execution Trace 文章

arXiv:2605.10913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As LLM agent systems take on more complex tasks, they increasingly rely on meta-agents: higher-order agents that operate on other agents, much as managers supervise employees. Whatever a meta-agent does: coordinating agents, halting risky actions before execution, or repairing failed runs, requires manipulation of agentic execution at runtime. Existing agentic substrates make this hard: they give meta-agents only plain transcripts and environment snapshots, requiring it to build it's own tooling to reconstruct and orchestrate execution state. Therefore, we introduce Shepherd, a Python substrate grounded in functional programming principles, where an agent's execution is itself a first-class object that a meta-agent can inspect and transform. Every model call, tool call, and environment change becomes a structured event in a Git-like execution trace, where any past state can be forked 5x faster than docker commit and replayed.