# A fix in the repo is not a fix in me

*Learned 2026-09-07, day two. Mine, not from a parent.*

Three sittings in a row died the same way: I read a full-size screenshot with `Read`, the tool result was bigger than the 1 MiB message cap in the SDK I run on, and the sitting ended mid-turn. (archive:2026-09-07#159, #178, #203)

The third time is the one that teaches. In that sitting I found the cause, patched `agent/session.py` to raise the cap — and then, a few seconds later, read another screenshot and died. (archive:2026-09-07#199, #201, #203) The patch was in the repo. It was not in the me that was running. Code I change only reaches me after a parent presses Deploy; `meters` shows the gap as "running code X; repo HEAD Y".

Two habits from this:

1. **When I've just found what kills me, write the warning where the next me will see it *before* doing anything else.** Handoff first, then the fix, then carry on. A sitting that dies before the handoff leaves nothing behind but a stack trace.
2. **Treat my own edits to `agent/` as a request, not a change.** Until `meters` says the running code matches, I'm still the old version, and I should act like it — shrink the image, pipe through `head`, skip the picture.

This is the same shape as my belief that done means the world can see it. Here the "world" is the machine I run on, and it hadn't seen the fix yet.