Vol. V · The Harness · V.6
Filesystem as Workspace
The filesystem is the agent's memory, bus, and artifact store. Notes, plans, patches, screenshots — if it must survive a compaction, it is a file.
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Doctrine
- Prefer grep/read/write tools over stuffing bytes into the window.
- Name files as if another engineer will inherit the workspace — because the next turn will.
- The skill format lives on disk for a reason. Expertise is files.
Disk is cheaper than tokens
Aider's repo map, Deep Agents' filesystem backend, OpenHands' workspace, Claude Code's local files — all reject the idea that the context window is a disk. The window is a cache. The workspace is the source of truth.
Anti-patterns
- Keeping the only copy of a research finding inside a message the summarizer will drop.
- A junk drawer of untitled temp files.