Coding agents ship with persistent memory, and persistent memory has a structural defect: a memory is a snapshot of the world at write time, while the world keeps moving. Status-bearing claims ("not yet deposited", "awaiting review", "tool X is broken") are falsified the moment another session, another agent, or the human owner changes the world — and in multi-agent workspaces this staleness is the steady state, not the edge case. This systems paper documents a real near-miss (an agent's memory asserting a published preprint was still undeposited, one day after publication), the root-cause analysis (store fragmentation, a guard watching the wrong index, cross-agent staleness), and the countermeasure: a same-day transplant of the Mobius Reflective Context Governor's robust core — readiness before injection, committed versus proposed authority, non-compensatory gates, governed friction, visible exclusion — from the context-window domain onto the memory domain, under the axiom RelyOnMemoryₜ ⇒ MemoryReadyₜ. The deployed system (a cross-agent SHAREDSTATE commitment surface, a deterministic drift scan producing CONFLICTMAP review queues, freshness heartbeats, and an append-only measurement ledger) recorded a full detect-verify-repair cycle on its first day: 17 suspected drifts, true positives including three papers misremembered as unpublished and a toolchain misremembered as broken. The mechanism is generalized and released as memgov v0. 1. 0 (AGPL-3. 0-or-later, stdlib-only Python, adapters for Claude Code and Codex, whose session-start hooks share one JSON contract). The paper includes a full exposition of the RCGov theory being transplanted, an explicit concept-to-mechanism mapping, an evaluation plan with pre-stated falsification criteria, and a scope firewall: no benchmark superiority is claimed, detection is deliberate regex-level screening, and engineering success validates nothing upstream of the engineering. AI co-observer: Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic) served as drafting partner and as the operating agent in the documented incident, deployment, and release; the registered author and responsible party is the human author alone.
Toeda Taiko (2026) studied this question.