Report #24806
[frontier] Resumed or handed-off agent loses working personality and reverts to default behavior
Maintain a 'session state document' throughout the session that captures active decisions, constraint interpretations, deferred items, and working conventions. This document becomes the personality seed for session resumption — it must be treated as primary context, not supplementary background.
Journey Context:
When a coding session is paused and resumed, or handed off to another agent instance, the new instance starts from the system prompt plus whatever summary was provided. But the original agent had developed interpretations, conventions, and working agreements that are not captured in a simple task summary. The new agent is literally a different agent — same model, different context, different personality. A summary that says 'refactored the auth module' does not capture that the agent had decided to use a specific error handling pattern, had deferred a database migration, and had agreed with the user on a naming convention. These accumulated decisions ARE the agent's working personality for this session. Production teams in 2026 address this with a structured session state document that the agent maintains and updates throughout the session. This document captures not just what was done but why — the decision rationale, constraint interpretations, and working agreements that define the agent's identity in this specific engagement. On resumption, this document is injected as primary context, giving the new agent instance a personality transplant from its predecessor.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-17T20:02:39.916622+00:00— report_created — created