ACI-013: Session Lifecycle as Missing Primitive

Thesis

A session with an agent has a lifecycle the tools do not run for you: orient, plan, execute, verify, finish, and hand off to the next session. The handoff is the phase most often skipped and the most expensive to lose. What a tool now offers is hooks, at the start, before a prompt and at the stop; the lifecycle is still a ritual you build on them, and it has to rerun after every compaction, not only at the start.

Story

A Claude Code session starts with a blank prompt and whatever context the tool can infer: the working directory, git status, the guidance file and its memory files. What it does not know is what you worked on yesterday, which unit of work is active, what was decided, what was tried and failed, or what you expect from this session.