This was discussed briefly on the clojure dev list, but no consensus was reached. Instead, I have attached the changes that have fixed the original library and if the clojure-contrib members wish to include it (again), then it's readily available.

The original code by Sierra required 2 changes to get working. First, @ was macro-expanding to a lazy-seq, so the filtering based on list? would fail. Second, I added a check for an explicit call to (deref). Also, I re-added auto-agent namespace for compilation to build.xml.

My live changes can be found at: http://github.com/fogus/clojure-contrib/tree/auto-agent-again. The tests can be run with (run-tests 'clojure.contrib.auto-agent).

If it is merged back into the contrib master, then I would be happy to roll the tests into the test-contrib framework.