The Right Context, Not All of It

Written deliberately as a lesson rather than a product story, taught through The Curator v3.80.0. Uses the analogy of a brilliant contractor who forgets everything each evening and needs an onboarding pack. Five lessons: 1. What context is. Start a session near 10% of the window and hand off by about 80%; the session boundary, not window size, is the constraint. 2. Why leave your harness at all. Subscription economics and model specialisation (build in one tool, audit in another). 3. Context dissected: Documents (handbook), Brief (standing orders, with read-back, a conflict protocol and capability fallback), Handoff (shift note), Journal (logbook) and the Wiki (library). Rule: "Knowledge accumulates. State supersedes. A canonical document is replaced whole and read verbatim." 4. Budgeting. Read-first vs on-request vs not-at-start documents, the session-start meter, and reading-budget presets. 5. Several harnesses and several computers. Exactly three routes (Personal Sync, the project's git, set up once per computer), the Setup check, and the menu-bar widget. Includes a ten-step setup guide, a classroom exercise, and an honest "what is not finished" list. Live handover tested between Claude Code, Antigravity and OpenCode; Codex and Cursor untested.