context-hygienelisted

The most invisible failure mode for a non-technical founder: nothing crashed, but the AI slowly got worse. The cause is almost always context — a session dragging weeks of history, or rules that lived only in a chat that ended. ## Rules - **Rules live in files, never in chat.** Anything meant to survive tomorrow ("from now on, always X") goes into a rules file (`CLAUDE.md`, a skill, a memory file) the moment it's decided. A rule that lives only in conversation dies with the conversation. - **One ticket, one fresh session** for building work (see `vertical-tickets`). Long-lived "everything" chats accumulate noise the AI re-reads on every turn — you pay more *and* get dumber answers (context rot). Our own logs: agents past ~250 turns were re-reading 100k+ tokens of history per turn, at premium prices, with visibly degrading judgment. - **The founder's own thread is exempt.** A founder's long strategy conversation is continuity, not waste — never nag them to close it. The cost lives on the AI's side: dispatch chores out, and suggest a single mid-thread compaction at a natural milestone if the session grows heavy — once, then drop it. Fresh-session discipline governs build work, not the founder's memory of their company. - **Long chat you can't leave? Compact it.** Summarize-and-continue (e.g. `/compact`) rebuilds the context and reloads the current rules. Even better when picking up old work: close and *resume* the session — full history kept, rules loaded fresh. - **New rules