Memory as Infrastructure: Reliability Engineering for Persistent Agent Memory in Months-Long LLM-Assisted Development

Abstract

LLM coding agents are crossing from task-scale to project-scale: single assisted efforts that run for months, across repeated context compactions, on codebases far larger than any context window. We report operational experience from one such effort (a research project under a single continuous Claude Code session line since January 2026, driving a 633,000-line codebase, with its memory subsystem continuously instrumented since July 2026) and describe SIx Harness, the open-source memory and continuity infrastructure that emerged from keeping it coherent. The harness combines per-project long-term memory (hybrid lexical-vector retrieval over SQLite, fully local), precision-gated context injection, anti-recurrence stores for decisions and dead-ends, conventions engineered to survive compaction, and, the part we argue is missing from operational practice, reliability engineering for the memory subsystem itself: a session-start health gate with discriminated failure modes, heartbeat telemetry designed so that no enumerated failure mode can pass unrecorded, and alert-fatigue budgeting borrowed from SRE practice. We present what we believe is the first months-scale instrumented operational record of a persistent agent-memory subsystem in production development use: 78,933 hook invocations; 85 recorded failures, none silent: 84 in the subsystem's first three weeks, one since, none in the final 20 days; an injection layer whose ten-day precision instrument shows zero false fires against an intact denominator; and three production incidents traced from instrument reading to structural fix. From the record we distill seven design principles, state our limitations plainly (N=1, no control arm, self-reported), and publish a tagged pre-registered ablation protocol that any team can run with the released MIT-licensed kit.