I just watched the Jake Van Cleef breakdown, and the biggest thing that stood out to me was decoupling system state from model memory by enforcing a strict file-based single source of truth (agent.md and structured folder hierarchy). It clicked because relying on in-context drift or proprietary model baggage creates non-deterministic failures—I'm purposely not using Claude here because it is already too knowledgeable on me, so running through these exercises with a clean harness ensures the architecture stands on its own rather than relying on model intuition. My main takeaway was that when instructions, boundaries, and context files are modularized directly on the filesystem, any LLM can be swapped in as a deterministic execution engine without losing state. The experiment at the end helped me understand how quickly an agent aligns when context is grounded strictly in explicit text files rather than conversational memory. Going forward, I'm going to standardize my project directories with dedicated agent.md operational files and explicit context maps to keep all agent actions strictly verifiable.