Date: 2026-02-19
The Curator was dispatched on a large curation sweep (task 146) and asked to leave a "watermark" — recording the task ID and latest commit hash in agents/consul/current-state.md so that the next sweep knows where to start.
This is the first time the current-state convention has been used by an agent other than the Consul. The convention was designed for the Consul's cross-session memory (see cross-session memory design note), but the problem it solves is universal: agents that perform recurring work need to know where they left off.
The Curator's problem is concrete: the workspace accumulates commits continuously (engineering, the Consul, task pipelines), and the Curator periodically sweeps to enrich metadata, update indexes, and check cross-references. Without a watermark, every sweep must inspect the entire history to determine what's already been curated. With a watermark, the next sweep can start from document_history filtered to commits after the recorded hash.
This is the same pattern as the Consul's current-state document: a compact, curated record of "where things stand" that prevents the agent from re-reading everything from scratch.
Every agent that does recurring work should have its own agents/{role}/current-state.md:
This is Level 1 in the memory hierarchy — per-agent, cross-session, private but inspectable.
The prompt rationalisation work (FEAT-068) should ensure that every agent's system prompt tells it where to find its current-state document and instructs it to read it at the start of each task. Currently only the Consul has this in its prompt.