Prompts were verbose and repeated the same story in every tool result, which
floods context and eats the output budget. They are now instructions only,
stated once. The 4-line wake footer is 'next: memo wake 2 246'.
Real harness caps, verified from source (Claude Code 30,000 chars, pi 50 KB /
2000 lines, Codex 10,000 tokens): the old PART_CHARS=8000 was sized against a
wrong 10 KiB figure and cost 8 calls per wake. 20000 costs 4.
Bugs found by audit:
- note assigned its id outside the lock: parallel sessions could collide
- a torn record from a crash misaligned every later record, permanently
- a note landing between two wake parts could shift a boundary and drop a line
(wake parts now render as of an explicit T)
- recall printed unboundedly and was silently truncated by the harness
Finding a block meant parsing the whole tree: 1.3s at a million memories, and
the Minilins write fast enough to get there. Records are now fixed width, so
position is identity -- memory i at i*320 of LOG.txt, block [ks,(k+1)s) at
k*288 of TREE/s. One seek, no index file to keep in sync.
A directory of one file per block was the obvious alternative and is worse:
25x disk (781 MB for 31 MB of text) and finding pending work still scans.
Here a level file is a dense prefix, so its length IS the watermark: pending
costs one stat per level. Measured at 1M memories: wake 0.96s -> 0.03s,
note 1.30s -> 0.02s, disk 370 MB -> 607 MB.
Measured: Codex CLI cuts tool output at 10 KiB or 256 lines, Claude Code at
30,000 chars, pi at 50 KB -- and each drops a different piece. A 320-line
memory is ~79 KB, so waking was losing memories everywhere, silently. Observed
live on pi: memories #0-#41, the compressed ancient past, vanished.
memo wake now pages the document into parts under the strictest cap and each
part names the exact command for the next. No harness is special-cased.
