Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Main idea
When you spend weeks on one subject with an assistant, the conversation looks like the place where the work resides: that is where you explained the subject, arbitrated, corrected, rephrased. It is only the place the work passed through. Close the tab and everything not written elsewhere is gone, without warning and without trace.
The reversal consists in designating the file system as the setup's primary memory, and the conversation as an input and output channel. What is said during a session doesn't count because it was said: it counts from the moment it lands in a file — a decision in the decisions file, a source in the sources folder, a lasting idea in a note. The next session doesn't reread the previous exchange, it rereads the files.
This is an architectural choice before it is a personal discipline. As long as the conversation is treated as the repository, every act of writing looks like redundancy you can skip when pressed. Once it is treated as a channel, not writing is no longer a saving: it is a scheduled loss.
Why it matters
This gives a single criterion for judging how assisted work is organized, and it can be checked: if tomorrow's session had to open with no history at all, what would remain? Whatever doesn't survive that question was never remembered.
It also requalifies what you expect from the assistant during the exchange. Its task isn't only to answer, it is to deposit in the right place what the exchange produced — failing which it is working on a medium that erases itself.
Nuances and limits
The principle only holds for a subject that lasts. For a one-off question, writing costs more than keeping it will return, and a full persistence setup is pure overhead here.
And writing isn't remembering: files fed but never reread or consolidated reproduce, in durable form, the illegibility of the history they were meant to replace.
Open questions
- Who decides, during the exchange, what deserves to land in a file — given that this sorting happens in the heat of the moment, in the middle of reasoning under way?