Real kernels have well-defined failure modes. Process crashes, OOM kills, filesystem corruption — there are decades of battle-tested recovery patterns. When your "kernel" is a language model, failure is probabilistic and often silent. The healer agent can fix a broken file, but can it detect when a sub-agent made a subtly wrong architectural decision that will cascade later?

The 5 sub-agent model maps loosely to microservices, but coordination is the part that kills you. How do you handle conflicting state when two sub-agents modify overlapping resources? File-based IPC is simple but gives you no atomicity guarantees.

Genuine question: what does the failure rate look like in practice? When you say "self-healing," is that recovering from syntax errors in generated code, or recovering from semantic failures where the agent did something technically valid but wrong?