Agentic Engineering Journey — Brain Dump

1. Where It Started: Memory and Context I started with Claude Code around April 2025. The first real step was recognising that Claude's native memory was essentially useless. The workaround was using markdown files as persistent memory stores, editable both through Claude and tools like Cursor. That opened the door to storing not just session notes but also instructions, roles, and agent skills — anything that would otherwise be forgotten across context resets. But the fundamental problem remained: at some point the context window fills, the model gets amnesia, and starts behaving destructively. Cursor handled this somewhat better at the time. Gemini had an edge due to its larger context window (already at 1M tokens), though at a cost. Neither was a real solution. 2. The Core Principle Taking a step back from tooling led to the central insight the whole framework is built on: The better the prompt, the better the output. The better the instruction — and the context around it — the high