persist — bstack P12 Persistent Loop Discipline

Cross-context restart loop. State in filesystem, not conversation.

The defining moves:

1. The agent writes a goal + state snapshot to PROMPT.md
2. persist iterate PROMPT.md spawns a fresh agent context per iteration
3. State persists in the filesystem (PROMPT.md + git tree + state.jsonl)
4. Validation backpressure: compilers/tests/linters, not model self-grading
5. Loop exits when success_condition fires OR budget exhausted OR user interrupts

Why this exists

METR's Time Horizon 1.1 puts the 80%-reliability deployable horizon at ~1 hour on Opus 4.6. Above that, model coherence degrades silently — context rot past ~100K tokens (the Dumb Zone). In-context loops (ReAct/TAO) fail because they share the rotting context window. Persist solves this by restarting the context every iteration while keeping state in the filesystem.

When to invoke

The reflexive trigger rule (full text in workspace AGENTS.md §P12):