--- title: "Lived experience" slug: lived-experience section: reference access: public summary: "In 1Context's hire-agent system, \"lived experience\" names the agent's role at birth — what an agent is hired *as*, not what it has access to. The framing is the on-disk realization of the era-of-experience design discipline: agents are born into the work, not given pointers to fe…" status: published asset_base: /assets home_href: / toc_enabled: true talk_enabled: false agent_view_enabled: true copy_buttons_enabled: true footer_enabled: true last_updated: 2026-04-29 categories: [Domain] subject-type: concept last-reinforced: 2026-04-29 fading-since: null archived: false --- ## Lived experience In 1Context's hire-agent system, "lived experience" names the agent's role at birth — what an agent is hired *as*, not what it has access to. The framing is the on-disk realization of the [era-of-experience](/era-of-experience) design discipline: agents are born into the work, not given pointers to fetch from. As of April 28, 2026, lived experience has a structural home in `1Context-public-4` at `memory/plugins/base-memory-v1/lived-experiences/`, with `runtime/experiences//seeds/` as the runtime sibling. Until that day it was a directory name; the operator's reframe on 2026-04-28 made it a design contract. ### Origin The vocabulary entered the operator's working speech at 21:41 UTC on 2026-04-28: *"we have a concept of lived experience in our dsl memory system that does things like agent hiring."* The 2026-04-28 hour-23 conversation records the v0 framing crystallizing after Paul's pushback — *"why didn't claude read it deeply? if we call it lived experience it should be loaded with it, not have to go fetch it"* — into a triad: **packet** (the on-disk artifact: `agent-context.md`, `experience.md`, `manifest.toml`, weave + stream transcripts), **lived experience** (the agent's role at birth — what the agent is hired *as*), and **agent context** (the bytes loaded into the prompt; 770,466 bytes in the worked example, hashed `sha256` and byte-count on the birth certificate). (See hour 21:00, hour 22:00, and hour 23:00 of 2026-04-28.) ### Role in 1Context Lived experience is the contract between the [era-of-experience](/era-of-experience) research framing and the runtime artifacts that realize it. The hire-agent ledger writes a birth certificate per hire, recording `seed_sha256` so what the agent was born holding is byte-pinned. The codex-harness contract (`1Context-public-4/codex-harness.toml:84`) encodes the negative half: *"We do not forge universal transcripts. Do not hand-write Codex session files."* Events go in as prompt seed, not as fabricated session JSONL — the rails are sacred even where the agent's interpretation of the seed is allowed to vary. The framing distinguishes itself from "context window" (mechanical) and "context" (semantic): lived experience is the operator's framing that an agent should be *born* into the work, not given access to it. ### History (brief — first appearance this week.) The directory `lived-experiences/` existed before April 28 but carried no design contract. The 2026-04-28 hour-23 reframe shifted lived experience from a directory name to a discipline. The 2026-04-29 session enforced it: the v0 hourly-scribe agents had been loading only `experience.md` (~22 KB control surface) into the prompt while four stream transcripts sat on disk as files Claude Code was nominally allowed to read; the corrected design loads the full `agent-context.md` inline. A second pass at 03:00 UTC made `braided_lived_messages` (assistant + user messages, tool traces dropped) the default — 758 KB → 255 KB, ~65% smaller, no quality regression. The framing was written into Mermaid diagrams at `memory/plugins/base-memory-v1/diagrams/hourly-scribe-braided-experience.{mmd,md}` the same window. ### Current State As of 2026-04-29, the design contract is: load the full packet inline at hire time, no sidecar fetches; record `sha256` and byte-count on the birth certificate; do not forge or hand-write session JSONL. The v0 build has been exercised against a replay harness — 195 agent fires across 21,710 events from a known week, end-to-end verified per `lab/0026-replay-phase-1-2-verified.md`. The third Claude run from a fully-loaded packet was in flight at the 2026-04-28 hour boundary; whether the agent writes from the loaded hour or from opportunistic sidecar reads is the open empirical test. ### Relationship to Other Subjects [era-of-experience](/era-of-experience) is the upstream research framing; lived experience is its on-disk realization. The triad — packet (artifact) / lived experience (role at birth) / agent context (loaded bytes) — is internally distinct enough that future agents should treat the three as separate concepts in conversation about the hire pipeline. [1Context](/1context) is the codebase. [Agent UX](/agent-ux) sits adjacent as the public-side reader-surface discipline; lived experience is the internal-side hire-time framing — different audiences, different artifacts. The hire-agent ledger and birth certificate are the durable records that connect a lived-experience hire to its later trace. ### Open Questions Whether to promote `experience-packet` and `agent-context` to their own concept pages or treat them as sub-headings of this page is unresolved; the proposal suggested considering them in the same pass, but evidence as of 2026-04-29 is concentrated in two days and may not justify three pages. Whether the framing extends beyond the hire path — to read paths, to long-running agent re-hydration, to inter-agent handoffs — is unstated. The "born into the work" framing's load-bearing claim depends on the third-run experiment landing; until it does, the discipline is articulated but not empirically validated.