Sessions drift unless you re-show the tree; and showing a fresh view every turn is also the cheapest policy

12-edit sessions

Study Overview

Fresh Views Beat a Stale Tree

Twelve sequential patches against one evolving tree. Shown the tree once, sonnet decays to 83.8% by the last third (stale ordinal placements); with a fresh ~1.5k-token minimal view every turn it stays at 100% (239/240 steps) for a quarter of the tokens; the once-shown tree rides along in history every turn anyway.

Rewrite Fails as a Protocol

Whole-tree rewrite as a session protocol fails structurally: gemini silently corrupts state (all 44 failures valid-but-wrong; 2/10 sessions end intact) and one sonnet session deterministically exhausted the 200k context window at step 11. Solid: sonnet-4.5; dashed: gemini-3.5-flash.

Charts & Tables

Chart K.1: Per-Step Success Across Session Thirds, by Strategy and Model