A rule nobody checks is a decoration
I've been running my context-management discipline on a real client programme where most of the execution is done by agents. The principles held up. The rules that were only writte...
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The Boiler Project, and the context engineering that made it work
A Home Assistant optimisation that turns a hot-water tank into the most valuable battery in the house, and a worked example of how deliberate context management turned a rumour and...
The context operating model I use for the projects that don't fit in a chat
My .md-file memory system was built for code. This is the version I run for consulting work (RfPs, discoveries, research) out of one shared folder. It uses the same hierarchical co...
Context rot has a name now: here's what four months of living with it taught me
A new piece lays out the mechanisms behind context rot and gives concrete token thresholds. I have been hitting those thresholds by hand since February. This post covers where the...
Claude Fable 5: what a new tier above Opus means for context management and agent teams
Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 yesterday, its first Mythos-class model, priced at double Opus. The context window did not grow. What changed is the management layer around it.
Bigger context, worse agents
I've been experimenting with feeding agents larger volumes of context. The pattern is steady: the bigger I make it, the worse it looks. Meanwhile, the rest of the field is racing t...
Paper rules break first
Two months of running the agent-team starter prompt taught me which rules actually hold. The ones wired into tooling survived. The ones that only lived in prose were the first to e...
The context wars: how Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok manage agent memory in 2026
I've spent months building context management patterns by hand. Here's how the four major platforms are solving the same problems at the infrastructure level, and what it means for...
My .md files vs Claude's memory tool: a practitioner comparison
Anthropic shipped a memory tool that looks structurally identical to the markdown files I've been maintaining by hand. Here's what each approach gets right, where they diverge, and...
Custodians of context: how our roles must evolve in the AI era
I've been writing about context management at the individual and team level. This post zooms out: if context is the real bottleneck in AI, who owns it across an organization, and w...
Separation of concerns in AI agent teams: lessons from multi-disciplinary delivery (and where they break)
We've been solving the 'too complex for one person' problem for decades in program delivery. Now some team members are language models, and the coordination overhead is measured in...
The recipe app I couldn't build six years ago
Six years ago I helped a CPG company design a smart meal planner. We never shipped it. This year my wife and I built it, and we use it every week.
When one context window isn't enough
Splitting a single AI agent into a team changed more than the workflow. It changed how context flows through the whole system.
Your .md files are a memory architecture (you just don't call it that)
The manual context management patterns that work today map closely onto the agent memory architectures being built for the near future.
A starter prompt that actually remembers what you told it
I rebuilt my Claude Code starter prompt around .md files as external memory. This covers why and how.
A Cowork starter prompt for non-coding project work
I built a knowledge-work counterpart to my Claude Code starter prompt(/downloads/STARTPROMPT.md). The coding version manages a repo; this one manages a consu...
Starter prompt v2 for Claude Code agent teams, refined
Updated version of my Claude Code agent-teams starter prompt(/downloads/STARTPROMPT-AGENT-TEAMS-v2.md) after two months of running the previous cut on real p...
A starter prompt for Claude Code agent teams
I rebuilt my Claude Code starter prompt(/downloads/STARTPROMPT.md) for agent teams. The original positions Claude as a single project lead that both coordina...
Claude Code's /memory is one-fifth of a context management system
Claude Code has a `/memory` command that appends facts, preferences, and constraints to a `CLAUDE.md` file — either global (`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`) or project-l...
My Claude Code starter prompt with built-in context management
I published my Claude Code starter prompt as a downloadable file: STARTPROMPT.md(/downloads/STARTPROMPT.md) It sets Claude up as technical lead for any proj...