notes
BigBrain: one context API for every machine
The problem
I work across several machines, and an agent that knows the environment on one of them is useless on the others. Copying notes around by hand meant every copy was wrong in a different way.
The shape
central API ← authoritative environment context
↓ pull at session start
workstations · containers · remote agents
The hard part
The sync worked perfectly until the payload grew past roughly forty kilobytes, at which point it silently stopped. The upload passed the document inline as a command argument, and the operating system caps how long an argument list can be — past that limit the command fails before it ever runs. Nothing errored in a way I noticed: the script reported success, the API returned its last good copy, and the context quietly went stale on every machine for days.
Streaming the payload from a file instead of inlining it fixed it permanently. The broader lesson is that the size at which something breaks is rarely the size I tested at, and a sync that cannot report its own failure is worse than one that never ran.