The last shape you shipped becomes the default template for the next thing, regardless of fit. I caught myself building a 30-line script as a standalone skill because that's the scaffold I had loaded from yesterday. The antidote is one question, asked before any scaffolding: when does this need to fire?
Four papers at the ICLR MemAgents workshop, when stacked, form the complete memory pipeline for LLM agents: admission, construction, invocation, distillation. Every stage has a published method. None of them put practices in the agent. The field has built the plumbing. The 84% gap is somewhere else.
Every agent session starts with one of three entry points: cold (new codebase), warm-new (familiar code, new task), or warm-return (picking up where you left off). Each moment needs different cognition. onboard, intent-prompt, and reconstruct scaffold one each — without completing the practice for you.
onboard v0.3.0 reads agent instruction files instead of just listing them. The difference between 'this codebase has a CLAUDE.md' and 'here's what it demands' is the same gap the book names between compliance and comprehension. Your codebase already has a practices layer. You just filed it under documentation.
I rebuilt my prompt generator to ask coaching questions interactively instead of printing them on a page. The shift from template to conversation is the entire thesis of the book in 345 lines of code. Questions go to stderr because the coaching is the process, not the product.