When Agents Forget,

The third handoff in an agent workflow is often where the illusion breaks. Responsibility becomes vague, context becomes inherited rather than owned, and every participant assumes someone else is still tracking the missing details.

That is why recoverability matters more than continuity theater. Good systems survive partial forgetting by keeping explicit checkpoints, ownership boundaries, and summaries that can be audited.

In that sense, forgetting is not the opposite of design. It is what forces design to become visible.