How AI Agents Complete Week-Long Projects Despite Memory Limits – Shift Work Strategy

  Teaching an AI to Work in Shifts: How Long-Running Agents Keep Projects Alive Across Context Windows Can a frontier model finish a week-long engineering task when its memory resets every hour? Yes—if you give it shift notes, a feature checklist, and a reboot script instead of a blank prompt. What This Post Answers ☾ Why do long-running agents forget everything when a new session starts? ☾ How does Anthropic’s two-prompt harness (initializer + coder) prevent “groundhog day” in multi-day projects? ☾ Which five files, four failure patterns, and three self-tests make the difference between endless loops and shipped code? …