Long Horizon Coherence

The recursion at the heart of the agentic era

We’re building models to have long horizon coherence. The bottleneck on building them is humans with long horizon coherence.

Long horizon coherence is the ML term for whether a model can hold a task across many steps without drifting, forgetting the goal, or compounding small errors. It’s the current frontier for the models. Strip the org scaffolding away from a researcher running multi-day agent loops, and it turns out to be the current frontier for the humans too. The trait we’re trying to manufacture is the trait we need to manufacture it.

That’s the recursion at the heart of the agentic era.

Three thoughts:

Founder Leverage

Founders are disproportionately valuable to their businesses. The standard story is vision and being core to the culture.

Vision is visible. It’s pitched, heard, repeated, internalized into culture. When done well it provides guard rails and steers decision making → coherence. Culture and vision done well over time is long-horizon coherence.

Founders are the heartbeat of long-horizon coherence on a single thesis for a decade.

Code Is Free, Focus and Coherence Are Not

The agentic development tooling we’re operating now deeply rewards long-term coherence, but it enables anti-coherence patterns simultaneously. The fault is not in the tooling, but ourselves and our organizations.

Most people are not long-horizon coherent, nor are the companies they build and manage. We will find this out more and more as iteration cycles speed up and the wheels come off.

Much of the modern era aggressively feeds anti-coherence mechanisms.

Vibe coding is fun and can be meaningful. It can also encourage ADHD and project sprawl. Any problem that catches your eye, you can attack now. The friction is gone. You can fix three things, rebuild a fourth, and prototype a fifth before lunch. Take another hit of inference; Civilization’s One More Turn meme in a chat window.

If schizophrenic project creation is yin, coherence is the yang.

The world is going to be inherited by the teams that can unleash the velocity of the agentic era while holding coherence. It will skew to smaller teams, tighter focuses, longer tenures.

The Monastery

Small teams, tight focus, long tenures. That’s a monastery.

We used to have institutions that mass-produced coherence. Benedictine monks took a vow of stability: you committed to one monastery for life. Same hours, same prayers, same direction, for sixty years. No transferring out. No quarterly reviews. The horizon was your remaining decades, and the structure required you to hold it. Apprenticeships ran the same engine in secular dress. Seven years with one master. No quick wins available by design.

These weren’t religious decorations. They were trait factories. You walked in at twenty, the institution wrapped you in a structure that demanded long-horizon coherence, and at sixty you came out with a stability of attention almost no civilian could produce.

Modernity dismantled most of these. Average job tenure is around four years. The whole optionality cult is the inverse of what the old institutions were building. Tech is the most aggressive version of the dismantling. It’s also the most reliant on the trait.

We tore down the monasteries. We’re about to need what they made more than they ever did. I’m long on monasticism.