Launch Contract
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A Launch Contract (also called an autonomous contract or agent contract) is a structured document or prompt artifact that establishes the governing rules, goals, and constraints for a long-running autonomous agent session, designed to be re-read by the agent at key moments to maintain alignment throughout extended work.
Role in Agent Workflows
The Launch Contract is a component of the Ask-Plan-Audit-Build-Verify Workflow described by Alex Damis. It functions as a persistent source of grounding for an agent operating over long, "messy forever" tasks — the kind of open-ended, multi-step work where an agent's behavioral drift or context loss can otherwise derail execution. →
Advocacy and Motivation
Alex Damis advocates for the Launch Contract as a practical engineering mitigation against a well-known failure mode in long agent runs: context compaction. As agents work through extended sessions, their context windows fill and older instructions get compressed or lost, causing the agent to lose track of its original mandate. Damis's solution is to build re-grounding directly into the agent loop:
"my loop basically tells it whenever you compact, go reread the launch contract" →
This claim — that context compaction during long agent runs is a real failure mode and that a launch contract with a re-grounding loop is the practical mitigation — is explicitly surfaced as a design principle, not merely a workflow suggestion. →
Key Properties
- Persistent authority: The contract governs the entire session and is treated as canonical even as context is compressed.
- Trigger-based re-reading: Rather than relying on the agent to remember its instructions, the surrounding loop forces re-consultation of the contract at compaction events.
- Scoped to autonomous work: The concept is specifically relevant to long-horizon or "forever" tasks where a single session cannot hold all context simultaneously.
Points of Disagreement
No speakers in the available material dispute the Launch Contract concept. All claims originate from or are attributed to Alex Damis.