Technique

The Filesystem

Mutable, inspectable world-state. Agents navigate and contour their own context.

Early on, we observed: agents reliably build an on-disk index, write scratch state, and rehydrate context via rg/open.

The Thought Experiment

If all you had were $HOME and vi, how would you keep track of an email you just sent, a grocery list, a Slack conversation, or compatibility constraints such as tire sizes versus rims?

The Answer

The answer is straightforward:

📁
Create directories with meaningful names
📋
Create indexes (typically Markdown)
💾
Write state to disk

In practice this state is most often Markdown, but frequently JSON or YAML, and in specific circumstances XML.

Genrefying

As the hierarchy of concepts evolves, it inevitably becomes unbalanced, redundant, or confusing. At that point, the corrective action is the same as for a human operator: reorganize.

"
In library science this process is called genrefying: restructuring information to optimize future retrieval.

Functionally, this resembles a familiar data-structures operation: rebalancing and reindexing. Here it is mediated by LLMs operating directly over the filesystem.

Implications

Self-Organizing Context
Agents can create and maintain their own knowledge structures as they work
Persistent Memory
State survives across sessions. This makes long-running work practical across many model calls.
Inspectable State
Humans can audit, modify, or reset agent state at any time
Composable Knowledge
Multiple agents can share and build on the same filesystem state

The filesystem becomes a substrate for agent memory, state, and coordination. It is both an artifact store and a mutable, inspectable world-state.

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