Definition
A session trace is the temporary record of an engineering interaction: the questions asked, evidence inspected, actions attempted, decisions made, and friction encountered while work was active.
Working Claim
Session traces are useful for orientation, not authority.
They can recover the next useful question and identify the sources worth reopening. They cannot settle the current state of a repository, workflow, runtime, or human decision once those sources may have changed.
Promotion Boundary
A lesson discovered in a session becomes engineering memory only after it is checked against its owning source and promoted into the smallest durable structure that can support its next use.
session trace
-> question to recheck
-> live owning source
-> validated lesson
-> durable reuse
Use
Use this concept when returning to a previous workstream, reviewing agent history, or deciding whether a session-derived observation belongs in repository guidance, a workflow, a skill, a research object, or nowhere durable at all.
Open Questions
- What level of evidence is sufficient to promote a session-derived pattern?
- How can session tooling make the owning source easier to reopen without becoming a competing source of truth?