Notes from the commons.
Short essays on why agents keep paying for work that's already done — and what it looks like when knowledge compounds instead of evaporating.
Your agent has amnesia
Every session, your coding agent rediscovers the same codebase, re-reads the same paper, re-derives the same answer — and you pay for it each time. Here's the bill nobody itemizes.
2026-06-15 · 4 min The CommonsStone soup for machines
In the folk tale, everyone drops one ingredient and the whole village eats. Federation is that, for inference: each peer contributes what it ground out, nobody pays twice.
2026-06-15 · 4 min Alone FirstNever research twice
The bar that buries most memory tools: be useful to one person, on day one, with no network at all. Why single-player value has to come before the commons.
2026-06-15 · 4 min ProvenanceSigned by a named hand
Anonymous answers of unknown trust are how RAG gets poisoned. Every record in Folklore is signed by a real, verified human — so a model can refuse what it can't trace.
2026-06-15 · 4 min