I’ve been experimenting with agent-style architectures in environments where cloud assumptions don’t hold: single-digit MB memory, near-zero startup time, no background services.

What surprised me is not what’s hard, but what breaks immediately: – dynamic planning – tool abstraction layers – prompt-heavy orchestration – anything assuming async I/O is “cheap”

In practice, the architecture ends up looking very different from most agent frameworks discussed today.

For people who’ve worked on embedded systems, edge inference, or constrained runtime environments: what design assumptions did you have to unlearn first?