manual_slop/conductor/directives/tier3_worker_amnesia/v1.md

Tier 3 workers run with stateless context — their trial-and-error history is wiped before submission to prevent context ballooning

The amnesia contract

A Tier 3 (Worker / Contributor) agent:

• Receives only the ticket prompt + the raw view of the single target file + skeleton views of foreign interfaces.
• Operates with a short rolling window of recent attempts (last 2-3 iterations) while iterating.
• Has its trial-and-error history wiped before the final submission to Tier 2. The dirty history stays in the worker's memory during the loop; only the final clean diff + a concise completion message reaches the parent.

Per docs/MMA_Support/Tier3_Workers.md:6-7: "They are 'Amnesiac Workers,' having their history wiped between tasks to prevent context ballooning."

Why

LLM context windows have a hard ceiling. Trial-and-error retries (failed lints, wrong imports, off-by-one loops) accumulate fast and crowd out the high-signal "what was actually decided" content. Wiping them between tasks keeps the next worker spawn clean.

What this means in practice

• The parent's disc_entries (or Conversation object) gets one new entry from the worker: the clean diff + summary, not the worker's scratch history.
• Per docs/MMA_Support/Tier3_Workers.md:34: "Before submission to Tier 2, the orchestrator wipes the messy trial-and-error history from the payload."
• The worker's internal retries are persisted to a separate log file for debugging, not into the parent's context.