A coding agent's conversation accumulates until it is the most expensive thing about the session, and what the session learned dies with the next clear unless something cheaper carries it. These four notes derive that carrier — per-project memory files under a checked context budget — from failures measured on one working machine, each dated and printed with its failing input. They are for someone deciding what to demand of an agent's working memory, not someone deciding whether to buy one.
One session accumulated a 224 MB transcript in seventeen days while a comparable project stayed at 18.6 MB on identical hooks — accumulation, not configuration. What a session learned is extracted into files, or paid for indefinitely.
Paper 002An index that points, topic files holding one fact each, state replaced at handoff, knowledge merged with dates and deletions, hooks at start and stop so the loop is not optional — two budgets from two authors, one arithmetic. The one phase no hook enforces is the one that decayed.
Paper 003The protocol declares three limits; the installed script checks four. Measured on 21 September 2026, four budgets were broken in the two repositories where the check is not installed; at the one workspace folder measured, every budget held.
Paper 004A note can be loaded and wrong, a restore can be the wrong continuity, no hook can force the unwritten lesson, and nothing crosses the project boundary. The limits, and the hand-off to The Second Layer.
A session transcript is an accumulation surface, and a budget on it binds only where a check runs. On one workstation a single session's transcript reached 224 MB in seventeen days, against 18.6 MB for a comparable one on identical hooks; re-measured six days later it was 236,422,970 bytes. The two shared memory indexes measured 539 and 978 lines against their own 80-line rule — the first grew twelve lines on publication day alone — and the checking hook ran in thirteen workspace folders and neither repository: at the one folder measured, every budget held; where the budgets were broken, nothing checked. The repair is files: state replaced at handoff, knowledge merged with dates and deletions, injected at session start. What files cannot prevent — stale numbers, the wrong restore, the unwritten lesson, the project boundary — is stated in Paper 004, and these notes settle none of the decisions they leave open.
The protocol files, hooks, indexes and transcripts here belong to one practitioner's workstation, a Digital One machine, and are not public: the figures are the operator's account, and every command is printed as run on 21 September 2026, so each check's shape can be reproduced on any estate. Vendors are named only where their public documentation is quoted, with dates read; no vendor is compared with another. Deliberately absent: prices, plans and tiers, and deployment internals.
These notes are contributed under CC BY 4.0: quote, reproduce and build on them with attribution, a link to the licence, and adaptations marked as such. The Foundation is an entity in formation; no public-benefit (ANBI) status is claimed at this time.