The Evolving Agent: How Jean2 Learns Across Sessions

I've been coding with AI agents for about two years. Every major one. Cursor, Copilot, Codex, OpenCode. They're good at generating code. They all share one problem. They forget everything. You finish a session, close the window, and the agent resets. Next time you open it, you're starting from zero. "We use pnpm, not npm." "The database is SQLite, not Postgres." "Don't touch the migrations folder." You repeat yourself. Every. Single. Time. Some tools added memory features. Usually as an afterthought. A pinned file. A custom instruction. A context window that grows until it hits a wall and everything old gets silently dropped. I didn't want a bigger context window. I wanted an agent that accumulates knowledge the way a colleague does. Not by being retrained. By taking notes, writing down what it learned, and reading those notes next time. That's what Jean2 can do. Not through fine-tuning. Not through vector embeddings. Through files on disk that the agent reads and writes itself. But here's the thing: none of this is on by default. By default, Jean2 is as bare as Codex or OpenCode. A blank prompt. No memory. No skills. No session search. You opt in to each layer in workspace settings . That's the point. You build the agent you want, layer by layer. The Four Layers If you turn them on, Jean2's agent has four knowledge layers that persist across sessions. They're not features bolted on top. They're part of the system prompt that gets composed every time a session starts. 1. Workspace Memory Turn on workspace memory in workspace settings , and the workspace gets two files: MEMORY.md for shared knowledge and USER.md for your personal preferences within that workspace. Both live at <workspace>/.jean2/ . The concept is simple. Shared knowledge that's useful for any agent working in that workspace. "We use pnpm." "The database is SQLite." "Don't touch the migrations folder." Whatever agent you bring in, coding specialist, reviewer, docs writer, they all get the same context