Stateful

Carries information forward. A session is stateful across turns — context accumulates as the session runs, which is why long sessions drift into the dumb zone. An agent can be made stateful across sessions by adding a memory system that persists information into the environment and reloads it at the start of future sessions. The model is never stateful; any apparent continuity is the harness re-feeding context. Counterpart to stateless.

Usage:

"It remembered my preferences from yesterday — does that mean the model learned them?"

"No, the agent's stateful because the harness wrote them to a memory file and reloaded them at session start. The model itself saw nothing of yesterday."