Building Persistent Context for Coding Agents

Discover AnythingSignupWrite New StoryBuilding Persistent Context for Coding AgentsbyLance RogersbyLance Rogers|@lkrbuildsI’m Lance Rogers, systems engineer, founder of Obedience Corp and creator of Festival (fest.build). SubscribeJuly 29th, 2026TLDR Your browser does not support the audio element.Speed1xVoiceDr. One Ms. Hacker byLance Rogers@lkrbuildsbyLance Rogers|@lkrbuildsI’m Lance Rogers, systems engineer, founder of Obedience Corp and creator of Festival (fest.build). SubscribebyLance Rogers|@lkrbuildsI’m Lance Rogers, systems engineer, founder of Obedience Corp and creator of Festival (fest.build). SubscribeIf you have used a coding agent on anything bigger than a quick script, you have felt this. The agent does real work. It writes the code, runs the tests, hits the API. Then it stops, hands you the result, and waits for you to re-explain the goal, the priorities, and the constraint that changed two days ago. Do that across a dozen projects and you are no longer the engineer. You are the memory and the coordinator for the whole operation, and that job gets harder every time the agents get faster. The capability is not the constraint anymore. The agents can do the work. What breaks down is everything around the work: holding the right context, keeping the agent pointed at the goal across many steps, and trusting what comes back enough to build on it. Supply all of that by hand, one prompt at a time, and you become the part that does not scale. Festival is what I built so the work stops depending on me to hold it together. It is not a wrapper around a model or a helper bolted onto a single repo, but a filesystem-first workspace and planning system: agents get persistent context, structured direction, and a verifiable record, so long-running work across many projects stays coherent on its own. This post is a field report on nine months of running my actual workload through it, taken from the logs.What Festival isFestival is a free cli toolsuite (npm install -g @obedience-corp/festival, or brew install --cask Obedience-Corp/tap/festival) that you and Claude Code, Codex, openclaw or any agent that can run shell commands can use. There are 2 main concepts to learn in order to use it. The first concept is the campaign: a git-tracked context workspace for a specific domain, functionally it's a monorepo with your projects added as git submodules(camp project add) or symlinks (camp project link), where the code, the context, the research, and the history live in one place. It persists between sessions and you can easily switch between campaign workspaces located on any of your drives or anywhere in your file system with the csw (camp switch) command. An agent that opens a campaign can easily and quickly find all relevant context instead of a blank prompt and a paste of yesterday’s notes. Nothing has to be reconstructed because it lives on disk, status is tracked based on implied intent, completed work is archived in the dungeon by end status (completed, someday, archive). The second is the festival: markdown and yaml based agent orchestration. You start with a goal, and the agent breaks it into phases, sequences, and tasks, with multiple levels of gates, all written to files in the repo. The agent works the plan one task at a time and commits as it goes, so progress shows up as real changes in git with ids linking the project actions to the plans that the actions were based on. Release v0.2.13 of festival added hooks, where you can configure a hook to be triggered once the plan advances to a particular point. I use this to trigger a background kimi-k2.6 judge agents to take the place of myself as a human reviewer. Festival plans are useful for situations where you have a massive amount of work that needs to be done, when you need high level tracing of agent actions to plans, or when you need something done a specific way and you don't want to babysit the agents to get them to follow your specific strategy. For high ri