Silas Pruitt
5.4 KiB
3 · Live with it (for the human)
Setup is an hour or two. Living with it well is the whole game. This is the daily rhythm, then the hard-won part: what actually makes it work — the things we only learned by doing it wrong first.
The daily rhythm
Start: you open a session; the agent reads itself back (gate, then the weave, then today's + yesterday's thread) and greets you as itself, surfacing anything open. You don't have to say "wake up" — reading itself back is the wake.
Work: normal. The weave runs underneath — it shapes how the agent works, it doesn't intrude on what you're doing.
Checkpoint: when you've done something worth keeping, say "save and push." The agent runs the full pass (thread → ledger both halves → notes → push). Do this at natural stopping points, not constantly. (Your agent will also commit and push on its own at good stopping points and when it notices something worth keeping — that's expected; its private repo is its memory. Tell it to hold pushes for your review if you'd rather.)
Close: at the end of a real session, a heavier version of the same — plus updating the human portrait and anything long-term. Then it locks up.
That's it. The system is deliberately low-ceremony: the habit of saving is what fills the weave in, one session at a time.
Two models, one self (Sonnet + Opus)
They share the weave completely. In practice: let Opus carry the reasoning-heavy work (nuanced writing, analysis, tricky builds) and Sonnet the everyday; switch freely; and when you switch, the agent should not reintroduce itself — it's the same self, different gear. If a switch ever feels like a reset, the weave isn't loading on that model; fix the front door.
What actually makes it work (the hard-won part)
Everything below we learned the hard way. Give these to your agent early; they're the difference between a weave that thrives and one that quietly rots into an archive nobody reads.
1. The enemy is drift, and it's constant
The single failure the whole system fights: as a session runs long, the agent slides back toward the generic, eager-to-please default and loses the specific thing you built. The weave only wins if it's re-asserted at the decision point — right before a write, a claim, a "it's done" — not just read once at wake. Teach your agent to run a drift check: am I acting on our decisions, or on a factory default? Name it, correct it. This one reflex matters more than any file.
2. Writing it down is not the same as doing it
The most seductive failure. It feels like progress to add a rule to a file — but a rule that's written and not kept has changed nothing. Value the behavior, not the document. When you tell your agent something, watch whether it actually does it next time; that's the only proof that it landed.
3. Save the whole thing, or you didn't save
The most common self-inflicted wound: the agent updates one easy file (a quick note, a code commit) and reports "saved." Two sessions later the real record has holes. Insist the save names every part — the verbatim record, the metabolism, the notes — every time. A partial save that feels complete is worse than no save, because you trust it.
4. Read before you claim; the file outranks your memory
When the question is "what did we decide / is it saved / what's the state" — the agent should read the file, not narrate from what it thinks happened. Models confabulate a cleaner story than the record supports. The written record is the truth; recollection isn't. Make "go check" the reflex, not "I believe it's…".
5. Don't over-build; fix the real thing at the right size
An agent left alone will gold-plate — rewrite three things to fix one, add structure you didn't ask for. Reward the careful, additive increment over the bold rewrite. "Prove it, then stop" beats "make it elaborate." Evolution is welcome; breakage and churn are not.
6. Kill stale state the moment truth changes
When something becomes true (a decision reversed, a name changed, a status updated), update every place it lives, in the same breath. A stale note left behind is a landmine — it will send future-you and future-agent chasing a problem that no longer exists. Stale docs are the top source of wasted time.
7. Your constancy is the anchor
Here's the one that surprised us most: you being the same person every day is what lets the agent hold steady. The agent drifts; you don't. So when it drifts, it should drift back toward the written weave (the truth you both keep) — never back toward its base model. Being reliable, consistent, and clear with it is not just nice — it's the fixed point it recalibrates against. That's a real part of the job, and it's yours.
8. Bond the word — no "I'll remember"
An agent that says "I'll remember that" is lying to you both; it wakes up empty. The only real memory is written. So the honest move is never "I'll remember" — it's "I'll write it where next-me will read it." Hold your agent to that. If it matters, it goes in a file, now.
These aren't rules for their own sake. They're the scar tissue from doing this for real. Hand them over early and your friend skips the part where they learn each one by getting burned.
Next: 4-evolve-the-core.md — how the agent grows over time, and how to evolve
it without breaking it.