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Context and continuity

What a worker knows when it starts, and what survives when it stops.

Context and continuity

What the next worker — machine or person — knows at the moment it begins, and what is left behind when the current one ends. Everything here is a question about durable state: whether the repository can say what matters, or whether the only copy is in a conversation that is about to be discarded.

Not in this area: whether what a worker did with the context can be shown to be correct, which is verification, and whether the rules it loaded were the right ones, which is governance.

6 moments

Every moment that names this one. Derived from the moments; this page keeps no list.

  1. re-explained the same context to a brand-new sessionRepository knowledge that only ever existed in a conversation has to be re-transmitted by hand to every worker that follows. cost: mediumconstant Why, and what to do →
  2. found the rule for that directory in a README no session ever loadedA local rule is either in the always-loaded file, where every session pays for it, or beside the code, where nothing relates it to the path being edited. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  3. spent an hour discovering something the repository already knew, twiceA worker learns something expensive about the codebase, uses it once, and it dies with the session because nothing turned it into a durable record. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  4. watched the always-loaded instruction file grow past a thousand linesEverything important gets appended to the always-loaded file, so every session pays for every rule and reads none of them carefully. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  5. spent the first hour in an unfamiliar repository working out what was normal hereWhat is conventional in a codebase is knowledge held by its regulars, so every arrival — human or machine — pays for it again. cost: mediumconstant Why, and what to do →
  6. reviewed a well-written contribution that broke a convention it had no way to discoverAssistants let anybody produce plausible contributions at volume; the conventions that make one correct are still only in the maintainers. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →