Cortex

Cortex is a conversational state compiler. It does not summarise a session and it does not store the raw transcript; it compiles a conversation into evidence-linked, human-maintained context states, and reconstructs a scoped orientation package for the next session. Where most tools do session-resume — drag the past forward — Cortex does orientation: given the current goal, it compiles the minimal working set that puts an agent back inside the right work, not into an empty chat box.

Agents are session-based, so every new session is a cold start. Summaries lose fidelity — the corrections, the constraints, why a direction was rejected — and pasting the whole history back pollutes attention. The field conflates three different things: memory (remembered facts), handoff (the last session's note), and orientation (what to load now for this goal). The unmet need is the third, and it is what makes continuity feel like working with the same calibrated agent rather than re-explaining yourself.

Continuity is not a memory problem, it is a fidelity-of-context problem: what defines an agent is not its weights but the context that shapes its activation. Arc's position is that this belongs in a substrate with the discipline of a compiler — every state traces to original wording, nothing becomes durable without human review, and the source is never modified. The mechanism is protected; the public claim is narrower and sufficient — that an agent's working context should be compiled and maintained, not summarised and hoped for. Cortex is the layer that lets an agent come back to the work.

Alpha