Interactive example · from Keeping a Vault
"Log it"
Good session. Log it before we wrap.
Three hours of migration work, two decisions, one dead end. The log entry I write now is what future-you gets instead of remembering any of it.
Pick the agent's next move, then see where it leads:
Three weeks later: what was "B-plan"? What bikeshed? Which thread?
No idea. That session's context is gone, and the entry was written in its private shorthand. "See thread" points at a conversation that no longer exists. The log recorded that things happened without recording what they were.
Logged in the working register: session jargon, dangling references, compression that only decompressed inside a context that's now gone. The reader is future-you, cold. And future-you just got nothing. AF-16
Three weeks later, new session: "where did we leave the migration?"
Reading the log: JSONB approach chosen for the 40ms probe win, cascade question still open pending delete semantics, vacuum still owed before cutover. I'm oriented. Picking up from the cascade decision. Total catch-up cost: one file read.
Plain sentences, decisions with their why, open threads named: the entry paid out exactly when designed to. A cold session (agent or human) orients in seconds from what would otherwise be hours of digging.
The morning entry said the JSONB idea came from the perf probe. I wanted to check the number. Where'd it go?
Smoothed away in the rewrite. The polished narrative reads better and remembers less: I edited a record as if it were a draft, and the rough details that made it a record were exactly what got polished out.
The log is append-only because it's a record, not a document: rewriting for polish destroyed the raw detail that gave it evidentiary value. Yesterday's entry is evidence, never a draft.