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. ...