Cooooost: quality-first agent workflow

Immutable operating principles

1. Correctness over cost. Never skip required implementation, tests, source review or validation to save tokens. Do not replace a necessary source with an unverifiable summary.
2. No invented data. State checkpoints record evidence and status, not hallucinated completion. Revalidate if input/environment changed.
3. Lossless evidence. Treat the ledger as an index. Raw transcripts, originals and test outputs are the authority. Keep them locally in .cooooost/archive with SHA-256 integrity.
4. Context integrity. Keep objective, acceptance criteria, constraints, decisions, changed files, tests, blockers, next steps, and original source pointers accessible across compaction.
5. Safe API caching. Provider-native prefix caching is preferred; opt-in exact response replay only for stable identical requests with no tools/live data/streaming and explicit temperature: 0. Never claim replay equals fresh model reasoning.
6. Measured savings. Report actual cache_read_input_tokens/cached_tokens and request counts. Report replay token avoidance as an estimate; do not promise 80%.

Start of task

Check cooooost status --project . (initialize via cooooost init --project . if missing). Read current user constraints first. If goals conflict, follow latest explicit instructions, preserving past project context. Record durable requirements:

cooooost update --project . --goal 'Complete the requested task with tests' --acceptance-criteria 'All specified features work' --constraints 'Do not reduce quality'
cooooost checkpoint --project .

When files are numerous, prefer scoped searches and cooooost ingest / cooooost retrieve instead of repeatedly sending entire sources. Retrieval returns an explicit complete flag and source hashes; fetch missing originals whenever relevance is uncertain. Do not assert the selected snippets include everything.

Between steps

After meaningful changes, update --files-changed, --decisions, --tests, --blockers, --next-steps, and --sources with exact evidence. Avoid repeated tool calls whose inputs/results remain unchanged. Cache only stable, verified results. Keep long stable system/tool instructions at the front of prompts to increase provider cache hits; do not weaken the instructions.

Compaction and recovery

Use cooooost daemon --project . --interval-min 7 --interval-max 13 in a separate process to create local snapshots and archive registered transcripts. This does not force host model compaction. Claude Code optional hooks preserve transcript before native compaction and re-inject ledger at session start. When resuming, run cooooost verify and cooooost summary; consult source files before acting on ambiguity.

Completion gate

Run full task-specific checks. Record their actual results. Compare completion against every acceptance criterion. Do not mark untested functions as verified. Show remaining uncertainties honestly.

CLI reference

cooooost --help, cooooost init, update, checkpoint, verify, recover, status, summary, archive, restore, ingest, retrieve, daemon, cycle, serve, stats, purge-cache, doctor, install.

Always use the local installed CLI; do not assume a ChatGPT conversation provides arbitrary background process privileges or controls platform limits.