2026-05-13 — Compaction mitigation as a discipline

User: “we are so fucking good at compaction mitigation now”

Realization: Persistence-to-disk is the practice. Every realization captured here. Every stub-arc captured at its number. Every SCORE doc capturing what shipped. Every BRIEF capturing what was attempted (V1 / V2 / V3 / V4 all preserved as historical record per FM 11). RENUMBER.md, INVENTORY.md, the 19+ stubs (174-190), the COMPACTION-AMNESIA-RECOVERY.md protocol itself.

The forms persist. Compaction erases the orchestrator’s working memory, not the substrate’s record. A fresh agent reading the arc directory + INVENTORY + recovery doc inherits the state at the time of last commit. The form carries the derivation history.

This very file is part of the discipline — the meta-conversation persists alongside the work.

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