Continuum

A local operating protocol for DSH: decide when a Session should end, how the next Session learns what it needs, and what must never happen automatically.

It is not a durable-execution framework, a workflow engine, or a memory system. It sits one layer above those. docs/landscape.md explains the difference and, more usefully, when you should reach for something else.

Install

./install.sh                      # install the two presets and verify them
./install.sh --workspace ../proj  # also initialise a workspace there
./install.sh --check              # verify an existing install
./install.sh --uninstall          # remove them

The installer writes only to ~/.dsh/.agent-presets/. It cannot reach the Host composition, the shipped presets, the persistence registry, the credentials, or the model route, and it refuses to run if the preset root resolves outside the user plane. Every install is checked byte-for-byte against the archived source, so a hand-edited install is reported as drift rather than quietly accepted.

What you get

continuum	context-engineering, research, routing, handoff
continuum-curator	workspace governance and safe migration
bin/continuum-workspace	dependency-free CLI: init, doctor --strict, status, context, close --dry-run (Python 3.10+; 3.11+ for the monorepo TOML package scopes)
plugins/continuum-handoff.js	source of record for the process-local hand-3/pkg-14 Host package
bench/benchmark.py	reproducible local benchmark, no API
docs/landscape.md	honest comparison, including the reasons not to use this

The idea

A long Session degrades: context rot, lost identifiers, half-finished work. The usual fix is to summarise. A summary cannot be validated, drifts from reality, and quietly becomes the only copy of an exact commit hash or a failed command.

Continuum instead writes a typed, checkable handoff: a frontmatter record whose fields are schema-validated, whose body sections must carry real content, and whose claims are re-checked against Git on every run. Then a fresh Session reads a bounded, redacted, hash-stamped projection instead of a transcript.

The parent Session is never deleted. /continuum-fork refuses while the Session is running, forks at a completed-turn boundary, and retains the parent. Archive stays a human-confirmed action.

Using it

Inside a DSH Session with the continuum preset:

/continuum-handoff T-0001     # bounded prompt for a fresh Session
/continuum-fork T-0001        # human-triggered fork, parent retained

The model tool continuum_handoff is current-Session-only and read-only. It cannot take an arbitrary cross-session id, archive, delete, or change a permission.

Verify

./bin/continuum-workspace doctor --strict                    # 0 errors, 0 warnings
python3 -B -m unittest discover -s .agent-workspace/tests     # 53 tests
node plugins/continuum-handoff.test.mjs                      # plugin regression
python3 -B bench/benchmark.py                                # local timings

The guards are mutation-tested: deleting any one of them makes the suite fail. That is checked, not claimed — including the four guards whose absence the suite originally failed to notice.

What it does not do

No crash loss budget. No external-effect deduplication. No authorization of a resumed run. No semantic memory. Five real-DSH gates remain DEFERRED and are listed in docs/acceptance-matrix.md. Automatic archiving and unattended recycling stay disabled until every one of them has an artifact, an exact version, a commit, and a reproducible result.

Read WORKSPACE.md and AGENTS.md before changing project records.