Multi-agent continuity. A decision made on Monday by one agent is still enforced on Friday by a different agent in a different session. Continuity is the temporal counterpart to propagation: across time, across context resets, across agent runtimes, the same compiled corpus answers the same questions the same way. It is what prompt memory was reaching for and structurally cannot deliver.
Concepts 10 min read · May 2026

# Multi-Agent Continuity

A team decision should not have a half-life. The moment a session ends, a context window closes, or a developer switches from Claude Code to Cursor, the decision should still be in force. Multi-agent continuity is the property that makes architectural decisions outlive the agent that learned them.

By Theo Valmis · Published May 2026

When a single human engineer writes code, they carry the team's decisions in their head. They remember the migration that's underway. They remember the deprecation. They remember why the legacy service has a different retry policy. Each PR is informed by months of accumulated context. Human memory is not perfect, but it is continuous: the engineer who wrote yesterday's code is, for most purposes, the same engineer writing today's.

AI coding agents do not have that continuity. Each session is a discrete instance. The agent does not remember yesterday's discussion. The next agent in the team's workflow has never heard of yesterday's discussion at all. Multi-agent continuity is the engineering property that closes that gap — not by giving agents memory, but by giving the team a substrate that every agent reads from.

Decision-side memory, not agent-side memory. Continuity is achieved by giving the team a persistent corpus, not by extending any one agent's context window. Sessions come and go; the corpus is what stays.

## What multi-agent continuity actually means

Continuity has three operational properties, each of which addresses a specific failure mode of agent-side memory.

### 1. Survives session boundaries

A decision recorded in a session must be enforceable in the next session — including one that starts five seconds later in a fresh context window. The decision is not in the agent's chat history; it is in the corpus. The next session does not have to be told; it queries.

### 2. Survives agent transitions

A decision recorded while using Claude Code must be enforceable when the developer switches to Cursor mid-feature. The decision is not in Claude Code; it is in the corpus. Cursor's session queries the same corpus and reaches the same enforcement verdict.

### 3. Survives developer transitions

A decision recorded by one developer's agent must be enforceable when a different developer's agent — on a different machine, with a different prompt history, in a different timezone — picks up related work. The decision is not in the original developer's session; it is in the corpus. The new developer's agent inherits the constraint by virtue of querying.

Continuity moves memory from the agent to the substrate. No agent has to remember; the substrate remembers for everyone. The team's collective architectural memory is decoupled from any specific agent's session lifetime.

## Why prompt memory cannot provide continuity

The intuitive shortcut is to make agents remember more — longer context windows, persistent threads, chat history, project-level instructions, "memory" features. None of these are wrong, but none of them provide continuity in the technical sense above. Each is a per-agent feature: longer Claude memory doesn't help Cursor, longer Cursor memory doesn't help Copilot, longer Copilot memory doesn't help CI.

Mechanism | Agent-side memory | Continuity substrate
--- | --- | ---
Lifetime | Session, or per-user "memory" | Repo-bound, versioned, durable
Cross-agent | No — proprietary to each tool | Yes — any tool queries the same source
Cross-developer | Private to each developer's session | Shared across the team
Auditable | Inside the model — opaque | External, versioned record
Compactable / truncatable | Yes — context window pressure | No — disk-backed and addressable

Prompt memory is useful for what it is: improving the agent's recall within a session. It is the wrong tool for ensuring that decisions persist across agents and across developers. Continuity is a property of the team's substrate, not a property of any agent's recall.

## The common misread: handoff messages as continuity

A familiar pattern: an engineer ends a session by writing a long handoff message into a wiki, or pinning a summary message in the agent's chat, with the intention that the next session — or the next agent — will read it. This is shared by convention, not by structure.

The failure modes are predictable. The next session does not read the wiki page. The handoff message is truncated by the next context window. The third developer in the chain joins without reading either. After three or four handoffs, the original intent is degraded; after ten, it is functionally lost. Continuity-by-handoff is high-effort, low-reliability, and unauditable.

Continuity is what handoffs are trying to do, but it is not the same thing. The substrate-based model removes the need for handoffs entirely: every session inherits the same decisions automatically, by querying.

## What continuity makes possible

When continuity holds, several downstream properties become available:

- Long-horizon refactors — a deprecation announced today is still enforced in PRs reviewed six months from now, even though no agent that was around at the announcement is around at review time.
- Multi-step agentic workflows — a workflow that hands off from a planning agent to a coding agent to a review agent maintains the same governance state at every hop.
- Onboarding velocity — a new engineer's agent inherits the team's full decision register immediately. The new engineer does not have to absorb every ADR before their first PR; their agent already queries the corpus.
- Cross-vendor portability — switching from one agent runtime to another does not lose architectural state. The corpus is the substrate; the runtime is interchangeable.

## Related concepts

- Governance propagation — the spatial counterpart. Continuity is "across time"; propagation is "across consumers." Both depend on a shared substrate.
- Decision continuity — the closely related concept that the same decision is enforced wherever it applies. Multi-agent continuity is the operational realization of decision continuity in environments with many agents.
- AI agent drift — what continuity prevents. Drift is what happens when each session re-derives the team's decisions from scratch.

Operational implications

- Architectural Governance Across Heterogeneous AI Coding Agents

  Claude, Cursor, Copilot — each has its own surface. Governance must be portable across all of them.

- Memory Is Not Governance

  Context persistence cannot enforce architectural invariants. Recall is not constraint.

- Why Prompt Memory Fails at Scale

  Context injection has a ceiling — no precedence, no enforcement, no persistence across sessions.

- Long-Running Agents Need Governance

  Persistent agents accumulate drift faster than they refresh context. Governance is the substrate they read from.

- Why Context Alone Doesn’t Prevent Architectural Drift

  Context engineering improves recall. Governance preserves architectural integrity. The missing layer between orchestration and verification.

Enforcement surfaces

- Claude Code

  PreToolUse hook enforces governance constraints before every file write.

- Claude Agent SDK

  Tool-call interception enforces decisions inside multi-agent SDK workflows.

- Cursor

  CLAUDE.md-equivalent governance surface for Cursor-based development.

- GitHub Copilot

  Governance layer applied to Copilot-assisted generation via shared constraint records.

Related demos

- Multi-Agent Governance

  Governance constraints propagate identically across Claude, Cursor, and CI in a single workflow.

- Claude Agent SDK Governance

  Governance before generation wired into the Claude Agent SDK tool-call layer.

Related concepts

- Governance Propagation

  Identical compiled constraints fan out to every agent, IDE, hook, and CI surface — one decision, one verdict, everywhere.

- Decision Continuity

  Decisions and their constraints survive intact across sessions, agents, and code changes.

- AI Agent Drift

  Agents diverge from architectural intent as soon as a run begins; drift compounds session by session without an enforcement substrate.

- Governance Infrastructure

  The engineering platform layer that encodes, distributes, versions, and enforces architectural decisions across agents and CI.