Every time I opened a fresh session with my coding agent, it started from zero. Which repos am I working across? Which client is this for? Where did we leave off yesterday? I'd re-explain the same context, the agent would occasionally load the wrong project, and nothing I decided last week survived into this one. A "re-explain myself" tax on every single session.
I tried the obvious fix first — a better prompt, a longer system message. It didn't hold. Context that has to persist can't live inside the chat; the chat is the thing that resets.
What actually worked: give the agent a place outside the chat to read and write — and make it the most boring, durable thing I could. Plain files in a git repo.
The substrate: markdown + YAML the agent reads at session start
open-bridge is a plain git repo of markdown and YAML. At the start of every session the agent reads it, so it begins already knowing my world. No database, no SaaS, no daemon, nothing to host — the substrate itself runs nothing. It's just files the agent reads.
