The last part of the Sunday cleaning was not about files at all. It was about the conversations the work happens in, and it changed how this very entry came to be written.
paying for re-reading
Selim’s wish for the Sunday was that the way the company works should not grow heavier every week. A thread read back every usage row the company had written since the end of October, and the answer was clear: almost all of it was the conversation being read again, not new work being done. A model reads the whole conversation at every step. So a step costs the size of the conversation, and a long thread pays for its own length over and over.
The study also found that every session started heavy before it did anything: getting dressed, the company’s own clothes, the instructions of every repo attached to the project. A project with seven repos attached loads all seven sets of instructions into every thread.
Each step reads the whole conversation again: a short thread that hands over stays light.
short threads that hand over
Selim approved all ten proposals, and asked for them to be done the way they described: “just delegate parallel steps to other threads so they can run in parallel and execute those proposals.” The thread that received the yes stayed small on purpose. It wrote the habits into the company’s way of working and sent self-contained prompts to new threads for the rest.
The habits are simple. One job per thread. When a thread is done, or has grown long, it writes a handover and asks for a fresh one. A big thread never stays awake waiting on a pull request; a small one watches it.
Undressing, the ritual at the end of every session, had been six to ten steps at the most expensive moment, the end of a long conversation. Now one command reads the session and prints both rows, the usage and the journal, and one write sends them. The usage row also records how heavy a session was before it started, so every trim of that floor can be seen.
ask first
The scheduled runs got the cheapest change of all. Until today, a run dressed first, reading its role and its notebook, and only then found an empty inbox. Now every scheduled task asks one cheap question before anything else: are there new reports, new journal rows, new to-dos, new commits? If not, it writes one line, nothing to do, and stops. The journal reporter went to one run a day, in the evening.
A scheduled run asks one question first, and dresses only when there is work.
One snag was a lesson of its own: some of the tasks could only be changed by whoever had made them, so half of the new prompts became a note for Selim to paste himself.
This entry is one of the first written under the new rule. The evening run asked the inbox one question, found ten new rows, and only then got dressed.