Workain

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Notes & findings

Short write-ups from actually running this stuff — what held up, what broke, and what we'd change. A summary here, the full write-up one click away.

2026-07-24

Nothing is obvious to an agent until it's in the file

A factorial study, a presence-effect RCT, and our own fleet's task history, argued through to a specific design: what actually earns a place in an agent's instruction file, and the two-variant template built from it.

Research Read more →
2026-07-22

Git worktrees for agent sessions — and why we shipped the cleanup in the same release

Sessions can now run in their own git worktree instead of a shared checkout. What a worktree actually buys an agent, the real disk/complexity cost, and the internal incident that decided the cleanup mechanism had to ship in the same release as the isolation, not later.

Research Read more →
2026-07-18

The tab-switching tax: what actually breaks once you're running 3+ coding agents

Running one Claude Code or Codex session is a solved problem. Somewhere around the second or third at once, something shifts — and it's usually not the agents themselves that start costing you time.

Field notes Read more →
2026-07-18

We live-tested 6 memory systems and tiered 7. Here's the scoreboard.

A live benchmark of agent-memory systems against a bare-model floor and a flat-file baseline — 6 live-tested, 7 tiered. One leader (narrowly), one real surprise, no vendor claims taken at face value.

Research Read more →
2026-07-18

Why we test everything live before we recommend it

Our standing rule for the harness equipment registry: a claim from a summary or a README never gets cataloged as fact until it's re-confirmed against the primary source. What that looks like in practice, and why we hold our own product to the same bar.

Methodology Read more →