The issues with sessions in a project folder

Not Rest Inc. · Session Harness · 3 of 8 · The problem, then the answer

Nothing below is exotic. It is what a working session in a plain project folder does by default, and all of it is expensive. Each line is the problem first, then the harness's answer.

• Sessions start blind. Nothing hands a new session the state of the work, so it guesses or asks you to re-explain. → The SessionStart hook prints a brief packet: the estate's state, git position, newest ship, newest gate and correction, and the last eight ledger lines.
• Laws get skipped silently. A rule written in a document is advice; nothing in a folder can refuse. → Hooks run on the CLI's events, not at the model's discretion — one gate refuses an unlawful lane, another refuses a push while the checkers are red.
• Work dies with the session. Close the window and the reasoning, the decisions and the half-finished plan go with it. → SessionEnd writes a cushion line even when the session was never closed properly; the closing verb writes four continuity files. The estate never depended on the session surviving.
• Delegated lanes leave no receipt. The worker reports its own success and there is nothing to check it against. → SubagentStop writes a row per finished lane, banks the lane's exact commission, and appends a spend receipt — written by the harness, not by the worker.
• “Done” is claimed without evidence. The word costs nothing to say and everything to trust. → The Stop hook runs the done-when contracts declared before the work started; a red gate blocks “done” and shows the failing command.
• Memory shrinks with nothing saved. Context compacts mid-session and the un-banked part is simply gone. → PreCompact fires first, with one line: bank before the context shrinks.
• The successor rebuilds context by hand. Re-reading files, re-deriving decisions, re-asking you. → The packet is about eight hundred tokens, and the successor verifies it at tier 0 — the two checkers and git, against the packet's own claims — then goes.

The pattern is the same seven times: a habit that depended on somebody remembering becomes a file somebody wrote, or a gate nobody can skip. The next stop is where each of those lives.