Lightweight, zero-dependency prompt that prevents AI agents from losing context
The append-only design log A prompting convention for working with coding agents over many sessions. The trick, in a paragraph Ask the agent to keep a design-and-work log, and make it append-only: numbered dated sections, never edited, later ones superseding earlier ones by citation. Require every section to end with a list of what was not done.
- ▪The append-only design log A prompting convention for working with coding agents over many sessions.
- ▪The trick, in a paragraph Ask the agent to keep a design-and-work log, and make it append-only: numbered dated sections, never edited, later ones superseding earlier ones by citation.
- ▪Require every section to end with a list of what was not done.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Gist |
| Canonical URL | https://gist.github.com/sourdecor/78b2ff9016f3f597934150a3501427ff |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:57:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T19:25:58.483Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T19:25:58.483Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | OO46v_kFcJlj · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The append-only design log A prompting convention for working with coding agents over many sessions. The trick, in a paragraph Ask the agent to keep a design-and-work log, and make it append-only: numbered dated sections, never edited, later ones superseding earlier ones by citation. Require every section to end with a list of what was not done. Then state that convention in the file the agent loads on every session. What you get is a document that keeps its own refutations. When a belief turns out to be wrong, the wrong belief stays on the page and a new section says so by number — so a fresh session with no context can't reintroduce the mistake as an improvement, which is exactly what it would otherwise do whenever the refuted design is the more principled-looking one.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gist.
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