Workflow

This started as a question applied historians ask routinely: can we find lessons from history that inform current practice? The specific case was commercial telegraphy and LLM agents: two systems that compress language for expensive, noisy channels. I went through a lot of telegraph techniques and operations asking what might be useful when working with LLMs. Almost everything survived (delimiters, confirmation, priority tiers, compression, validation, observability, access control) but as information management fundamentals, not telegraph-specific insights. They entered the general toolkit long ago. (Some comparisons are in the appendix.) ...

Most LLM assistants don’t maintain memory between sessions. The standard workaround, a large CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md with everything in it, breaks down quickly. What’s more, it duplicates other content in your repo, growing the documentation maintenance surface without adding value. Lately I avoid this problem by treating CHANGELOG.md as my LLM’s memory: specifically the [Unreleased] section from the format standardized by Keep a Changelog, which becomes the primary mutable state document. ...