Context
The decisions are made once and needed repeatedly. Kept in a transcript they are unfindable; kept in prose they go stale silently; kept nowhere they are made again, differently.
Work that outlives the session doing it
A task spans days, several sessions, or several people, and the reasoning has to survive the gaps.
Fits when
- Decisions need to be findable later by the task and commit that made them
- Progress must be quotable without reading everything that led to it
- Something unresolved should block acceptance until it is answered
Does not fit when
- The work is a single sitting and nothing needs to be recalled afterwards
- You want a knowledge base; this keeps operational state, not documentation
Both lists are required. An entry declaring only what it fits is refused by the generator and by majordomus doctor.
What you would do here
- Record a decision as data, and prove the tool cannot accept it for youRead the decisions a repository holds, validate the whole set in one command, and watch the tool refuse to write the one status only a person may write.described adr · knowledge
- Keep the prompts that started the work, below the model rather than around itWire the provider hook, prove it by running a payload through it, and see that a prompt the tool could not parse is reported rather than silently dropped.described capture
- Hand unfinished work to the next sessionStop mid-task and leave the next worker something to act on that is not a transcript.described checkpoint · handover · context · check
- Find out what has drifted since anyone last lookedAsk what has moved, rather than whether anything is wrong.described watch · update · history
- Decide whether finished work is actually finishedEvaluate a contract line by line instead of accepting a sentence that says the work is done.described finish · question · check
- Record a decision so the next worker can find itWrite down what was decided and why as state, then find it again without reading a conversation.described decision · search · history
- Record what one worker did in one sittingOpen a session, do the work under whatever tasks it touches, and close it into an envelope that references what it produced and copies nothing.described session · history · knowledge
- Keep the plan as milestones and issues the tool can validateDeclare milestones as outcomes and issues as execution contracts, and let the tool say what is ready and what is blocked.described plan
- Start a session from a rendered framing, not a pasted transcriptList the prompt assets the repository ships, render one against the durable state, and read the context it embeds.described prompt · context
- Block acceptance on a question nobody has answeredOpen a question against the task, watch finish refuse completion while it is unresolved, resolve it with the answer, and only then complete.described question · finish · check
- Checkpoint long work so a stop costs minutes, not the dayRecord compact progress inside the active task at the profile interval, so a session that ends without warning leaves the next one a place to start.described checkpoint · check · context
- Complete an issue only when its evidence existsSee an issue refuse completion while a required piece of evidence is missing, read the roadmap the milestone state derives, and keep the GitHub projection a projection.described plan
- Deliver issues in waves the graph computes, and take the next oneValidate the plan, read the execution waves the dependency graph yields, see which issues are ready and which are blocked on what, and take the one issue a worker should do now.described plan · start
- Read back what happened, and keep the ledger within its capRead the append-only ledger as operational history, filtered by task and event, validate every line, and rotate the oldest lines into an archive rather than deleting them.described history · search · watch
- Read only the context that fits the budget, and know what was droppedAssemble the context a worker needs now in authority order, cut it to a line budget, and see every dropped section named with its reason.described context · check
- Hand work over with a question still open, and keep it blockingClose a task into a handover while a question is unresolved, start the follow-up task, and see the same question still refuse acceptance there.described handover · start · check · question · finish
- Have the session opened and closed without anybody remembering toWire the provider''s own session events, and the episode opens when the sitting begins, hands the worker what the last one left, records what a compaction is about to discard, and closes with a continuation record beside its envelope.described capture · session · doctor · start · checkpoint · handover
- Work on a branch in the one worktree it belongs toStart a branch without choosing a path, find every checkout of the repository from any of them, and bring a stray one home with its uncommitted work intact.described doctor · context