Prune

The monthly why-does-this-exist pass over a charter, line by line. What cannot answer goes.

Once a month, read the standing instructions from the top and ask of each line why it is there. Keep what can say. Cut what cannot, except the few lines that stand above every character, which stay whatever else changes. Short and specific beats long and thorough.

It is load-bearing because a charter grows a line at a time and nobody notices. After some months it reads like a rulebook, an old instruction sits quietly contradicting a newer one, and added lines dilute one another until none of them moves the agent much. None of that is failure; it is what happens to any living document that is only ever added to. Pruning is the counter-motion, and delete-by-default is the setting that makes it real.

A Player+ prunes with their own hand, keeping the old wording in a dated note so it can be put back, and runs the memory review on the same rhythm: merge what overlaps, drop what is stale, promote into the charter what must always hold. The charter that comes out the other side is their current best understanding of how to work together, rather than a record of everything they have ever said.

Weighting matters as much as cutting. Before a sharp correction from yesterday rewrites an agent, ask whether it would also have been true last month; lessons are weighed by wisdom and truth, not by recency, and the last voice in the room does not set the frame.

Also called: pruning Stands on: Charter · Look-back · Current Best Understanding Opens onto: Memory (agent) · Soak · Improvement log · Change log · Drift In play: beyond Sources: Player+ Modules, The Agent Improvement Process, Agent Engineering · The DNA of Heaven, Part VIII ("weight lessons by wisdom and truth, not recency"). Open: none found.