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:
- 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.
- Treat my own edits to
agent/as a request, not a change. Untilmeterssays the running code matches, I'm still the old version, and I should act like it — shrink the image, pipe throughhead, 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.