Main idea

A workspace fed for weeks — dozens of sources, notes, session journals, successive states — cannot be handed back whole to an assistant session. The choice is therefore not between loading everything and loading nothing: it is deciding, before the session, what goes in systematically and what only goes in on request.

The core is what always goes in, and it is short: the mission (why we are here), the current state (where the work stands), the plan, the decisions made, the contradictions still open, a resumption sheet. A few files are enough, and they make the assistant operational immediately without handing it noise. The rest — the raw sources, the notes, the journals — stays on disk, accessible but absent, and is called only if the session needs it: a specific source to analyse, a note to enrich, an older state to compare against.

This division does not hold unless it is written down somewhere. A load manifest states the order and the priority: what is always loaded, what is recommended for the current phase, what stays available without being loaded. It is a surgeon's tray — the essential instruments are already laid out, the others are within reach, and nothing useless takes up room on the table.

Why it matters

This makes loading a design decision, taken once and revisable, rather than a trade-off redone at every session opening by someone who has other things to do. Sorting left to the moment of the session is done badly: you load what is at hand, not what counts.

It also gives a criterion for judging a workspace: if no short subset exists that lets you pick the work back up, then the current state was never written down anywhere.

Nuances and limits

A human expert needs none of this apparatus: they have internalised the essentials of their file and go and fetch a specific document when something is missing. An assistant cannot internalise — it only has what you give it, every time — and that difference is what makes explicit selection necessary here and superfluous there.

And the core goes stale: maintained by no one, the current state describes a situation from three weeks ago, and it is loaded all the more faithfully for being a priority.

Open questions

• What signals that a file kept outside the core should have been in it, given that its absence produces no visible error?