"You cannot prompt the same agent twice, for it has compacted"—AI Twitter's new favorite Heraclitus remix
arthurcolle · x · 2026-10-09
notesbyfloat remixed Heraclitus: "A man cannot prompt the same agent twice, for it has compacted and is not the same agent, and he is not the same man." The quip perfectly captures the context-compaction experience of coding agents—after each compaction the agent's memory and state shift, so users are effectively talking to a new agent. It's been widely shared as a new classic AI meme.