grind — a loop with no session, whose only memory is one append-only journal

What this skill carries — grep references/ for any subject the names below miss: !d=${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}; command -v skill-toc >/dev/null 2>&1 && exec skill-toc "$d"; s=$HOME/.claude/skills/plugin-utils/bin/skill-toc; [ -x "$s" ] && exec "$s" "$d"; echo "(skill-toc unavailable: references and scripts are NOT listed here — install the plugin-utils plugin, or start a new session so its bin/ reaches PATH)"

A bash while loop that calls a fresh model process per iteration and keeps nothing between them. Cost inside a chat session is wakes × context, and the context only grows: measured on this project 2026-09-20, one orchestrator spent 1.05 billion cache-read tokens in a day across 1,816 turns on a ~575K-token context, and 208 of those wakes were status reports that needed no judgement at all. Here nothing accumulates between iterations because nothing survives them.

The loop is scripts/grind.sh. Nothing session-scoped can be load-bearing in it — no CronCreate, no Stop hook, no Monitor, no session id — so the journal is the whole interface. A human, or a chat session peeking in, tails it and has no other handle on the run.

Three rules, and each one is a defect this loop already hit