Workflow
Why AI agents forget, and what to write down
You told the agent to stop using that deprecated client. It agreed. Forty minutes later it imports the deprecated client again, with the same confidence as the first time. You did not imagine it. The correction is gone.
Where the correction went
An agent's working memory is its context window: the conversation, the files it read, the output it produced. That window fills up. When it does, the host summarizes or drops the oldest parts, and your correction from forty minutes ago is exactly the kind of small, old detail that summaries lose.
This is not a defect to wait out. Bigger context windows move the cliff; they do not remove it. Anything that matters past the next few thousand tokens needs to live somewhere that does not get summarized.
Deciding what deserves a file
The fix is unglamorous: write things down, in a place the agent is required to read back. Nanostack draws the line like this. A thing deserves a file when a later step depends on it:
- The scope agreement from /think becomes the brief. Planning reads it, so the cut features stay cut.
- The plan from /nano lists files, risks, and exclusions. Review measures the diff against it.
- The findings from review, security, and QA each get an artifact. The ship gate requires them.
- Solved problems get captured as know-how, so the next sprint searches past solutions before reinventing one.
Each file is JSON with a SHA-256 integrity hash, under .nanostack/ in your repo. The next phase reads the artifact through a resolver, not the chat history. The correction survives because it stopped being conversation and became input.
The test for your own setup
Whatever tool you use, the question is the same: if the conversation got wiped right now, what would the agent still know about this project? If the answer is "whatever is in the repo", then everything you negotiated today, scope, naming, the do-not-touch list, is one compaction away from gone. Agents do not need to remember better. They need fewer things that only exist in memory.
The workflow built on this idea → · How know-how carries between sprints →