Every Session Starts From Zero. I Kept Forgetting That.

You correct someone once. Not perfectly, but they get it. Next time, they do not make the same mistake. That is not optimism. That is just how correction works, "with people". I worked with agents on that assumption for a long time before I even noticed I was doing it. The plan that never held Before I had a single written rule anywhere, I would open a new session and ask for a plan first. Resolve the edge cases before touching a line of code, I said. The agent would agree, in whatever way a chat window agrees, and go straight to implementation anyway. I corrected it. Same session, it adjusted. New session, next day, same repo, same everything except the chat history: straight to implementation again. Every single time! So I did what looked reasonable. I wrote the plan myself. I resolved the edge cases myself, the open questions, the gaps the agent skipped past on its way to code. ' Tedious ' is the polite word for it. I was doing the one task I brought the agent in to do, and calling it collaboration. The same recipe, again The second correction arrived the same way. Every repo had its own shape. A recipe, a standard, a way things were supposed to be built here and not there. I would explain it. Full session, good results, the agent following the standard like it understood the standard. New session. Same repo, sometimes the new repo. Explain it again. Word for word, close enough. It was not that the agent forgot how to code. It was that nothing from the last conversation traveled with it into this one. Nothing said in the chat survives it I kept treating this like a training problem. Say it clearer. Say it earlier. Say it with an example next time. None of that was wrong exactly. It was aimed at the wrong layer. The actual mistake was assuming correction compounds the way it does with a person. It does not. A person carries what you told them into the next conversation without being asked to. An agent starts the next session exactly where it started the first one.