I'd typed some version of the same paragraph into Coder Agents chat a dozen times before it occurred to me that I was the bug.
Long agent sessions have a specific failure mode: the context window fills up, a compaction kicks in, and if it lands at just the wrong moment — right after a fresh prompt, before the model has really absorbed it — the summary that comes out the other side is subtly wrong. Not broken, just off. You don't notice until three tool calls later when the agent is confidently doing the wrong thing for a reason that traces back to a compaction that quietly lost a detail. The fix, once you notice it, is always the same: stop, write up exactly what's been done and what's next, and hand it to a fresh chat before the old one gets any worse. I'd done this by hand often enough that I could recite the handoff template from memory.
Separately, and for no related reason except that both were things I did constantly, connecting a brand-new workspace to my homelab workstation over SSH was its own little manual ritual — generate a key if one didn't exist yet, copy the registration command over, register it on the homelab side, retry the connection, repeat next time from scratch.
