Around turn 30, my agent loses its mind. The task we've been debugging for an hour? Gone. The constraint I whispered at turn 12? Never happened. The system hits a token ceiling and rewrites everything into a few bullet points that miss the one thing that mattered.

I fixed it. I asked the agent to write down what we were doing so it could reload when it woke up lobotomized. It worked. Life changed.

It still resets. The file goes stale, the agent reads about a task from days ago, confidently steers us toward work that ended Tuesday. I correct it. Compaction hits again. Same stale file. Same wrong task. A five-minute task becomes a debugging afternoon.

The learning: whatever you build to prevent the lobotomy, it will find a new way to forget. The safety net becomes old rope. The amnesia lives rent free.

I indulged in agentic productivity. Cron jobs, skills, automated everything. And here I am, doing what I did yesterday: reminding my agent what we were working on.