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. A trace is history and orientation; its value depends on how clearly it points back to a source that can be checked and 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.
A trace recovers a question to recheck. The live owning source answers it, a validated lesson reaches a durable surface, and a later use returns new evidence to that surface when the work changes.
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?