# Memory and always-loaded context

Context Most AI tools have amnesia. Yours does not.

### Two kinds of memory

There is a context window — the agent's short-term memory for the current conversation. Fixed size. Old messages drop off. Start a new chat and it's empty. There is long-term memory — what the agent remembers across sessions. No size limit. It can hold years of context. Long-term memory splits into two buckets that you should never confuse: Always-loaded context — general behavior. Loaded at the start of every session. How the agent works, no matter the task. ("Always send progress updates while you're working." "Never wait silently — keep me posted.") Skills — specific task behavior. Loaded only when called. Recipes for recurring jobs. ("How to format my emails." "How to summarize a transcript and extract action items." "How to draft a proposal.") If a rule is about how the agent operates in general, it goes in always-loaded context. If a rule is about how to do a specific task, it's a skill. You never edit either of these by hand. You tell the agent what you want and it writes the rule in the right place. The simple analogy: always-loaded context is what the agent memorizes — its name, your name, your address, the rules of the road. Skills are the reference books on its shelf. It doesn't memorize a cookbook; it grabs the cookbook when it's time to cook. Treat alwaysloaded context as the agent's brain — small, focused, always with it — and skills as the library it reaches for when it needs them.

### The bloat problem

Always-loaded context costs tokens every session. If it gets bloated, the model starts ignoring rules — there's too much in front of it for any single rule to feel important. Symptoms: The agent confirms a rule is there but doesn't follow it. It forgets things mid-session that it has rules about.

Long sessions feel slower and dumber than short ones.
Fix: run this once a week.
Audit your always-loaded context. For each rule:
1. MOVE TO SKILLS: if it's about how to do a specific task, extract it into a new or existing skill so it only loads when needed.
2. CUT REDUNDANCY: if the same idea appears twice, keep one canonical version.
3. COMPRESS: rewrite what remains in fewer tokens. Tables beat paragraphs. Bullets beat prose.
4. REPORT: show me what you moved, cut, and compressed. Goal: minimize always-loaded context so the rules that remain have maximum weight in long sessions.

Run this and you will be shocked how much sludge accumulates in a month.

### Project folders and build logs

For bigger pieces of work, ask the agent to set up a projects folder with a subfolder per project. Each subfolder gets a plan file and a build log. Add a rule to always-loaded context: "before working on any project, read its plan and build log first." That plus good skills = no memory problem, even on multi-month builds. What goes in always-loaded context, what goes in skills, and how to keep both clean.