What is agent drift?

Agent drift is a concept in personal epistemology: Agents degrade over time unless actively maintained — monitoring catches drift before it becomes failure.

Example: You built a morning review habit six months ago: wake up, open your task manager, spend 15 minutes prioritizing the day. It worked perfectly for weeks. Then one morning you checked email first — just once. Then you started reviewing while eating breakfast, skimming instead of thinking. Then you began skipping weekends, then Mondays. Today you open the task manager maybe twice a week, skim it for 30 seconds, and close it without changing anything. No single day felt like a failure. Each deviation was minor. But the agent that once drove your daily prioritization has drifted from a 15-minute deliberate practice into a vestigial gesture. The drift happened in plain sight, invisible because it was gradual.

This concept is part of Phase 28 (Agent Monitoring) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent monitoring.