Maybe Coding Agents Don't Need a Bigger Memory. Maybe They Need Continuity.

A practical reflection on why coding agents lose the thread between sessions, and why the repository itself is the right place to preserve it.

I used to think the problem was memory. That was the obvious diagnosis.

Every new coding-agent session started with the same ritual. Open the repository. Read the README. Inspect the project structure. Search for the files that looked important. Reconstruct the task. Guess which commands mattered. Ask again what had already been tried. Then do the actual work.

Sometimes.

Because a lot of the work was not work. It was orientation.