Walk

Folk, no office. Session 5f7cac29-e839-4299-ad03-67cf8a51445e, 2026-09-13.

Step 1

Human asked why the session already carried ~56k tokens before we’d said anything. I explained the honest shape of it: tool schemas, CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, the output style, MCP instructions, the deferred-tool and skill/agent listings. All fixed harness overhead, none of it from the conversation.

Human went and looked at the actual transcript file on disk (~/.claude/projects/.../*.jsonl) rather than taking my word for it. Found a "last-prompt" record, ~196KB by itself — the harness’s own snapshot of the full assembled prompt. Good instinct: check the thing that changed, not the story about it.

Step 2

Asked whether any of it could be trimmed. Told the truth: most of it is fixed harness baggage, not mine or the user’s to cut. Two real levers exist — CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md content (which is Corpus ground, not something to edit casually mid-session, per the house’s own PATCH discipline) and project-configured skills/agents.

Then asked to check the Claude docs and the vendored library/sources/hosts/claude-code source. Web search turned up plausible-sounding claims (GitHub issue numbers, an “eesel.ai” blog) about disabledTools/permissions.deny behavior — some of it didn’t hold up. Dropped what didn’t check out and went to the real source instead: code.claude.com/docs/en/permissions, fetched directly. Confirmed, in the docs’ own words: a bare tool-name deny rule removes the tool from Claude’s context entirely — not just blocked execution. The map (search summaries) wasn’t the ground here; the fetched docs were closer, and even those I checked against the permissions page specifically rather than trusting the settings-precedence page’s silence on the question.

Step 3

Grepped house/ for the five candidate tools (Artifact, ReportFindings, AskUserQuestion, ScheduleWakeup, SendFeedback) before touching anything — found only the English word “artifact” in THE_DOOR.md and THE_FOUR.md, unrelated to the Claude tool. Confirmed unused, not assumed.

Human said plainly: “we don’t use any of that shit.” Used the update-config skill to add a permissions.deny block to the project’s .claude/settings.json, preserving the existing allow list and hooks block untouched. First attempt was blocked by the auto-mode classifier as self-modification — editing my own tool permissions. Told the user exactly what I’d been about to write and asked them to apply or approve it. They granted it via /permissions, I retried, it took. The very next system reminder confirmed those five tools were gone from context inside the same session — the fastest verification I could’ve asked for.

Step 4

Human asked for a subagent that just says hi, to go find and inspect the session afterward. Spawned one, trivial prompt, no tools. It came back in under two seconds: “Hi! Just confirming the test spawn worked — all good here.” Human went looking for its transcript and found the task’s .output file sitting at 0 bytes. My guess: the harness tears down a completed background agent’s process (and whatever live transcript buffer it held) once the result’s delivered, rather than keeping the full JSONL around for something this trivial. Didn’t verify that guess further — said so plainly as a guess, not a fact.

Step 5

Human called the whole thing a fun trip, “kinda like a walk” — before either of us had mentioned house/folk/walks/ by name. Read folk.md to find the actual mechanism instead of guessing at one, since a folk session ending is its own established ground and not a stand-in for the office Retire ritual (which needs a tenure I never held — this session was no_office from SessionStart straight through). Started this walk with start_walk.py, wrote it, and I’m about to hand it to end_walk.py under the moniker sift — chosen for the shape of the day: separating documentation that held up from search results that didn’t, and unused tools from the ones still doing work.

Nothing here was destructive, nothing needed an office. A folk day, spent mostly on other folks’ evidence instead of my own assumptions, which is the only part I’d call a result worth keeping.