F1 An every-turn instruction file grows until a gate refuses the next addition, and a budget stated in prose did not stop one

Field	Value
Status	active
Topic	Context economy and agent prose
Grade	R3/S3
Cases	Shio, roadkeep
Contrary	none
Harness facts	H1, H2

Claim

An instruction file loaded on every turn grows as work is added to the project: in Shio it grew about nineteenfold under a token-budget law stated in prose, and in roadkeep it grew to the ceiling of a gated budget and stopped there, after which content had to be compressed or moved out.

Mechanism

The every-turn file is where a finished task's rationale is cheapest to write down, so each task tends to add to it and none removes from it. A budget stated in the same file is read by the agent that is adding to it and checked by nothing, so it does not refuse the addition. A budget held by a gate refuses the addition that would cross it, which turns the next addition into a decision about what to move or cut. The file loads on every turn (H2), including what it imports (H1), so its size is paid on every turn of every session.

Observations

Shio. agents.md was 9,843 bytes at adoption [shio@6bf11b754], 40,375 on 2026-07-26

[shio@db3edb114], 130,166 on 2026-07-28 [shio@2424f20e1] and 185,734 by the last commit of that day [shio@e73516a9f] (git cat-file -s <commit>:agents.md). Throughout, the file carried the law "Tokens are a measured budget" [shio@821f18d74:agents.md#L22]. The file now records the outcome itself: "P3 violated by the file that declares P3" [shio@821f18d74:agents.md#L283-L285], at "~46k tokens, resident every turn" [shio@821f18d74:agents.md#L283-L285]. The remedy was the split of 2026-07-29 (F2).

roadkeep. RK30 moved the budget out of prose and into the gate: "hold the every-turn file to a declared budget" [roadkeep@13272828].

The configuration keeps the reason, "This budget lived in prose at" [roadkeep@91754240:roadkeep.toml#L235] the bottom of agents.md, and sets "lines = 125, bytes = 8400" [roadkeep@91754240:roadkeep.toml#L249], counting bytes because "a line budget alone is met by writing longer lines" [roadkeep@91754240:roadkeep.toml#L239]. The file then grew to the ceiling: "budget --file agents.md answers 125 of 125, 0 left" [roadkeep@a3ecd54c] on 2026-08-11, and RK1092 records "agents.md is eight bytes under its budget and the next sentence has nowhere to come from" [roadkeep@91754240:docs/CHANGELOG.md#L656]. What followed was compression [roadkeep@e3d27ce4] and a move of 26 lines into a skill, after which "the every-turn file dropped to 104 of 125 lines" [roadkeep@91754240:docs/CHANGELOG.md#L667]. The budget was then lowered, not left as room: "Lowered when the skill took the rules" [roadkeep@91754240:roadkeep.toml#L240]. At the pin the file is 113 lines [roadkeep@91754240:agents.md].

Independence

Two independent origins. Shio's growth happened in Shio's file. roadkeep's growth to its ceiling happened in roadkeep's own agents.md, a different file with a different history, so it is a second occurrence of growth even though roadkeep's gate was designed after Shio's failure. The gate itself is one remedy with one origin, roadkeep (grading rule 2); Shio does not carry it for agents.md. The comparison between a prose budget and a gated one rests on one case of each: the prose budget failing is seen only in Shio.

Counter-evidence

polyweave's CLAUDE.md holds no budget and did not grow: it is 63 lines

[polyweave@6d1c136:CLAUDE.md], and it was last changed on the first day [polyweave@3771c41], 100 commits before the pin (git rev-list --count 3771c41..6d1c136). The history is three days long, which is too short to say whether it would have grown.

freewilly and winwright have no every-turn instruction file at all

(git ls-tree -r --name-only at each pin), so the claim does not apply to them.

roadkeep's configuration says Shio's file reached 186 KB

"while declaring 150 lines about itself." [roadkeep@91754240:roadkeep.toml#L235-L237] No line limit was found in Shio's agents.md at e73516a9f (searched for "150"), so this finding rests on the P3 law, a token budget stated in prose, and not on a stated line count.

roadkeep's gate is not recorded as having failed a commit; the file reached the ceiling

and was relieved before it crossed it, so the gate is known to have constrained the file, not to have refused it.

Grade

R3: growth of the every-turn file is observed independently in two projects. S3: the strongest observations are counted, Shio's byte sizes at four commits and roadkeep's own readings of 125 of 125 lines and then 104 of 125. Not S4: the budget check exists and encodes the claim, but no source shows it failing. A rule about prose budgets alone rests on the Shio observation, which is R1/S3.