AI Systems Atlas

X-10State Representation

/context/state-representation

How task state is written down decides whether it survives compaction, restarts, and model swaps.

Step-by-step walkthrough2 variants · 6 steps

Prose

  1. State recorded as loose prose — already hedged, already vague.
  2. Every compaction paraphrases the paraphrase.
  3. Three summaries later, the file name is gone and the step count never existed.

Structured

  1. State recorded as an explicit object with a schema.
  2. Compaction has a rule: structured state is preserved, not summarized.
  3. Byte-identical on the other side. Schema beats vibes.
Key insight

Structured state (JSON, checklists, diffs) can be copied verbatim through every compression; prose has to be re-understood every time, and drifts.

Failure mode

Narrative state: each summarization paraphrases the last paraphrase until file names and step counts dissolve.

Further reading
RelatedContext compactionCheckpointing

Elsewhere in the atlas

Harnesses →Security →Evals →Coding Agents →Tools →Ops →