v0.8.10 — A budget you raise whenever it stings is not measuring anything

Changed

• The always-on context budget is retired; the divergence check now asserts the runtime's own read
  limit on the auto-memory index. A total budget over CLAUDE.md + its @-imports + the index
  derived from nothing on disk: in the reference deployment it was set at 20,000 bytes, then 30,000,
  then 40,000 within three days, moved each time it stung, and it watched a number with no loss
  attached. Measured on the same box, it would have fired about eight times before the one limit that
  actually costs you something — the runtime loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md
  at session start and silently drops the rest, so a memory past that point is already invisible
  to recall. Worse, its remedy said to shorten the index, which is the recall surface. Now:
  MEMIDX_MAX_BYTES / MEMIDX_MAX_LINES drift on breach, an [info] line past 80%, and the full
  total still prints every run because the trend is the signal. These are vendor constants, not
  derived ones — the one deliberate exception to
  decisions' derive-the-expectation rule — so the script pins the docs
  URL and the date they were read, and takes 25 KB as 25,000 so a stale reading fails towards firing
  early rather than towards silence. Proven against lowered thresholds before shipping: silent at the
  defaults, drift at 10,000 bytes and at 50 lines, [info] at 16,000.
• agent-audit's memory pass gains the two growth steps, and the cross-tier checks from the
  reference deployment's 2026-09-03 pass. What keeps the index under the runtime's limit is this
  pass, with a human reading the diff — never a threshold, and never the session that happened to
  notice the number. The steps: retire dead episodic index lines (the line goes, the memory file
  stays, so a future session can still grep for it) and reduce curated bullets to verdict + pointer
  wherever the bullet already names the decision record holding its reasoning. On the reference agent
  13 of 79 index lines were dead episodic notes, and the curated file had grown 2.4× in fifteen days
  by carrying reasoning that a named record already held. The same pass also picks up the checks that
  had not been ported: whether the two tiers agree rather than merely not duplicating, and ordering
  present-state re-verification by the frontmatter modified field instead of file mtime — a bulk
  restore resets mtime for a whole store at once, and on the reference store 26 of 72 memories shared
  a single mtime minute.

Fixed

• The date of the second over-trim of the reference deployment's curated memory file, in
  agent-audit: 2026-08-18, not 2026-08-22 — the 22nd was the restore. Caught by an advisor pass.