Constitutional Memory

Time Is the Cheapest Option argued that a file's age is the cheapest compression an agentic harness can get: two tokens that let a model skip what it doesn't need to read. Push a claim like that hard enough and it should either become a theorem or break. So it got formalized and stress-tested.

The conjecture: any budget-limited predictor of a changing world is forced into one canonical form, content plus a single log-bucketed recency coordinate. If true, forgetting curves, LRU caches, RL discounting, and file timestamps are all one theorem.

It broke. And the way it broke is more useful than the theorem would have been.

Where age fails

Hidden changepoints. Unobserved changes mean age isn't a number you have. It's a belief, and collapsing a belief to a point destroys predictive information.

Multiple clocks. A repository is many subsystems on independent schedules. There is no single clock.

Constitutions. The killer. Some information is written once and stays predictive forever: protocol versions, founding configs, interface contracts. Age points the wrong way here, deprioritizing the most load-bearing files in the corpus.

And the price is exact. In worlds that regenerate, the gap between content-plus-age and full sufficiency is precisely the information the constitution carries. What timestamps miss is not noise. It is the timeless core.

What survived

In regenerative worlds age is not a heuristic but an exact coordinate: content plus elapsed time is the full predictive state. And the logarithm is forced, not chosen: if rescaling time must act as a simple shift, the coordinate is log time.

Equal log buckets are still not universally optimal. For one truncated power-law source, the optimal four buckets are [1], [2,3], [4,9], [10,1000], nowhere near the equal-log split. The question you ask introduces a scale even when the world has none.

Two channels

Temporal memory. Ordinary artifacts carry cheap ambient age, and attention follows recency. The two-token timestamp earns its keep here.

Constitutional memory. Founding configs, interfaces, and invariants get pinned, exempt from age: these are exactly the artifacts recency mismeasures.

The corrected claim, smaller and truer: a privileged now is canonical for changing worlds. Log age is canonical wherever change is scale-free. Content plus age suffices only where the world regenerates. Constitutional memory is what must be added when regeneration doesn't erase the past.