The Warm-Up Problem: Why Your AI Agent Needs a Boot Sequence

Most AI agents start cold. No context. No memory of what they were doing. No awareness of what they should never touch. Every session, they begin from scratch. That's fine for simple tasks. It's a problem when you're running agents that operate autonomously across hours or days. The fix is a boot sequence. What a Boot Sequence Does A boot sequence is a set of instructions that runs before the agent does anything else. It answers three questions: Who am I and what's my job right now? What state was I in when I last stopped? What are my hard constraints? Without this, agents make expensive mistakes in the first few steps of every session — misidentifying their scope, repeating completed work, or ignoring rules they should know cold. The Minimal Boot Sequence Add this to the top of your SOUL.md: ## Boot Sequence (run first, every session) 1. Read SOUL.md (identity + mission + constraints) 2. Read current-task.json (what am I working on?) 3. Read context-snapshot.json (where did I leave of