codalisted

# The Coda An agentic session has no terminal cue. There is no compile, no deploy, no colleague standing up to leave — the medium supplies nothing that says *this is finished*. So sessions end by attrition: the human stops when something external interrupts, and the work is left in whatever state the interruption found it. Two costs follow. The unfinished threads keep their pull, because nothing wrote down where they were. And the next session opens cold, re-deriving from a diff what the previous session already knew. > **The Coda** — the good ending. A ritual that closes a session deliberately, > records what landed, and parks every live thread with a concrete resume step. **What it attacks:** *drift* — the "while we're here" extension nobody deliberately chose — and the cold-start cost of an unrecorded stop. Not compulsive continuation itself. The Coda's only defence against continuing is a refusal that steps aside the moment the human plainly asks it to, and a plain request to continue is the shape that failure mode takes. Claiming otherwise would be an overclaim in the sentence that names the sentinel. ## The ritual Four steps, same order every time. | # | Step | | --- | --- | | 1 | **Survey** — what landed, what is still live | | 2 | **Park** — one record per thread, committed | | 3 | **Closure summary and reflection** — via `/reflect` | | 4 | **Close** | ### Why parking comes before reflection The portable reason: the closure summary names what was parked, and