Why I stopped reading my own backlog.md (and what I read instead)

The morning my own file lied to me Wednesday, May 21, start of session, coffee next to the keyboard. I ask the agent where we stand on the DEV.to series. Clean answer, articulated, "Four articles on stand-by, ready to publish." I reread. Half a second of unease, because I think I saw two or three of them go through DEV.to last week, but I slept in between and I'm no longer sure. I type the question that changes everything, "Are you sure articles remain to publish?" The agent re-queries the DEV.to API in parallel, opens scripts/devto/state.json , crosses the two. The four articles have been published for two or three days. What I just read wasn't a hallucination. The agent did exactly what was expected of it, namely open articles/backlog.md , read the table, restitute what it said. I'm the one who had stopped updating that file. sync-backlog.ts hadn't run after the pushes of last week. The markdown said "stand-by" while production said "published" . The typist didn't lie. She read faithfully a file I had written myself and that I was treating as authority while nothing was maintaining it. A summary is a Cache without a refresher This is the most common failure mode of a solo project that lasts. Each day produces two flows. On one side the matter that moves, made of commits, deploys, rows in the database, statuses that transition. On the other side the writings we draft to keep our bearings, namely backlog.md , the root MEMORY.md , the Sunday-night session note, the README of the folder we refactored last week. These writings are produced quickly, in the gesture that closes a sprint, and they are maintained slowly, or not at all, because nothing in the pipeline triggers to close them. R6 of the Counterpart Toolkit says it for SQL columns, Live / Snapshot / Cache mandatory . Any column derivable from other data must declare its category in the commit that creates it. If it's a Cache, the refresher mechanism ( GENERATED ALWAYS AS , SQL trigger, materialized view with pl