144 recoveries, one carefully bounded task

The earlier recovery experiment proved that the pieces connected. This follow-up asks whether adding recent conversation history helps a worker resume after an independent reviewer has repaired the code.

Can a compact handoff preserve recovery?

The worker was a selectively quantized Qwen3.8-27B across two RTX 3090s. GLM repaired all 18 initial bundles. Each validated handoff and patch then reached eight matched continuations. Three harnesses, two reasoning efforts, two context modes, six histories and two repeats produced 144 scored continuations.

The result

142 passed after the first handoff; two needed a second review. All 144 eventually passed the original acceptance checks. Both context modes completed 72/72, with 71/72 first-handoff passes each.

Minimal context used 1,677,430 worker tokens; recent history used 3,929,677. Across all six matched harness/effort comparisons, recent context increased paired median worker time by 8.9–203.2% and coding tokens by 3.2–184.0%. Long-history outliers influence the totals, so the paired comparisons matter more than a single aggregate ratio.

What I would keep

Minimal is the provisional choice for this workflow. Installed recovery defaults were left unchanged. Scored worker, summarizer and reviewer usage totals 9,717,148 tokens; shared first-bundle work is counted once. That token total does not imply a dollar cost.

The next useful test is a broader task corpus. Repeating one task under different failure histories demonstrates recovery behavior, while leaving general coding competence unresolved.

Evidence and publication boundary

This is an edited account of the recorded experiment. The linked archive is private; the methods, aggregate findings and limits are included above. Reference recordings, raw conversations, authentication material and workstation configuration are excluded.