My/AI/Agent/Fleet/Bed Down

• Fleet — Bed Down

  • Ending a Claude/Code context window on purpose and starting a fresh one in the same tmux/Pane, so a long day does not accumulate into one enormous session. The My/AI/Agent/Fleet ceiling is 200k tokens.

  • Why there is a ceiling at all

    • The measured shape of the problem: on 2026/08/17 the chiefs peaked at 358k–484k tokens, and the herdr era reached 641k. None of those sessions were told to stop.
    • Long sessions get worse rather than better. They hold conclusions that were true earlier in the day and re-derive things they already knew — the failure that Chroma/Paper/25/07/Context Rot - Increasing Input Tokens Impacts LLM Performance measures, arriving as confident staleness rather than as an error.
    • So three or four context windows in a day is the correct number, not a sign that something went wrong. Bed down at minimum after the first deliverable, in the early afternoon, and before closing for the day.

  • The cycle

    • ctx-check <session-name> → if the verdict is BED-DOWN SOON or BED-DOWN NOW, refresh the handoff doc → bed-down <session-name> <handoff-doc>.

  • ctx-check

    • Prints the session's live context size as a percentage of 200k, and a verdict: OK, BED-DOWN SOON at 85%, BED-DOWN NOW at 100%. CTX_BUDGET overrides the 200k.
      • sh

        ctx-check hayward-2026-08-24
        # hayward-2026-08-24: 63,624 tokens = 32% of 200,000  ->  OK

    • An agent cannot see its own context total, which is the whole reason the script exists. It reads the number from the session's own transcript under ~/.claude/projects, so asking costs no model tokens.
    • The size is the last usage record's input_tokens plus cache_read_input_tokens plus cache_creation_input_tokens — the whole input of the most recent request, which is the live context.
    • Matching is on the agentName field recorded by claude -n, not on the working directory. Several sessions can share a cwd, and on 2026/08/17 three did. A seat that never passed -n cannot be found this way.

  • bed-down

    • Writes over the current pane with a fresh claude that reads the handoff doc first:
      • sh

        bed-down hayward-2026-08-24 tmp/hayward-handoff.md

    • Implemented as tmux respawn-pane -k -t "$TMUX_PANE", so it must be run from inside the pane being replaced; it exits rather than guessing when TMUX_PANE is unset.
    • It refuses unless the handoff doc exists and was written in the last 15 minutes. That guard is the point of the script: respawning without a current handoff destroys the only copy of what the session knew. Both refusals were tested against their failure cases before the script was used.

  • The handoff doc is not a summary of the day

    • It is what the next context window needs in order to keep working: what was in progress, what had been concluded and how it was checked, what had been ruled out, exact paths, and the next action.
    • Write it for someone with none of the author's context, because that is exactly who reads it.
    • A day's report doc and a handoff doc are different documents with different readers. The report says what happened; the handoff says what to do next.

  • Where the scripts live

    • Four of them, not two: bed-down, ctx-check, wake-successor and viewer. As of 2026-08-24 Mon they sit in bin/ beside the day's fleet conventions, under the tmp/ tree, and there are two byte-identical copies — one in My/Dotfiles and one in the work knowledge vault. Use the copy in whichever repository the pane is working in, and note that this garden holds neither: a seat here that looks locally finds nothing and has to reach across.
      • That is a staging location, not a home. tmp/ is gitignored in both repositories that carry the scripts, and the scripts are untracked in both, so every copy exists on this machine only and a fresh clone gets none of them. This garden is the exception that makes the pattern easy to misread — its own tmp/ is tracked and published.
    • Where they land permanently is a My/Dotfiles question and goes through My/Pref/Dev/AI/OpenSpec; it is not settled here. Recording the path as though it were the answer is how a garden page rots.
    • bed-down reads a file's age with stat -f %m, which is the BSD form — it wants the GNU spelling to run on Linux.